STATE  NORMAL.. .,.., 

liOS  JRHGEIiES,  CJlIi. 


UNIVERSITY  c^  '^^^^ TFORNU 

/- 

LOS  AivG.  UiS 
UBKAliX 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/considerationsonOOIafaiala 


CONSIDERATIONS  ON  PAINTING 


■jy^y(^- 


l^f 


CONSIDERATIONS  ON  PAINTING 


LECTURES 

GIVEN  m  THE  YEAB   1893 

AT  THE  METROPOLITAN  MUSEUM 

OF  NEW  YORK 


/^^7^ 

BY 

JOHN  LA  FARGE 

*• 

i    3    »         t               ,*,*•*          •*!          •           I            t»I» 

Weto  gork 
THE   MACMILLAN    COMPANY 

LONDON:  MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Ltd. 
1901 

All  rigJUa  reserved 

NOV  1907 


ft 


OOPTSIOBT,   1806, 

bt  macmillak  and  00. 


S«t  np  and  eleetrotyptd  July,  1895.      Reprinted  Jmumt, 
1896;  January,  1901. 


VoTtooot  9Tt«a 

J.  8.  Ouhiog  k  Co.  -  Berwick  li  Smith. 
Norwood  Maai.  U.S.A. 


U  5  O 


PEEFACE 

I  FEEL  that  the  printing  of  my  lectures  brings  with  it  a 
certain  difficulty.  Lectures  intended  to  be  read  within  the 
Museum,  with  a  continual  reference,  implied  and  often 
expressed,  to  the  place,  the  objects  gathered  within  it  and 
their  associations,  must  have  had  a  certain  fitness  which 
will  be  more  or  less  diminished  when  they  come  to  be  read 
under  different  conditions.  Moreover,  they  were  written 
and  spoken  with  an  idea  always  present  in  my  mind :  that 
I  had  a  class  of  students  whom  I  was  addressing,  and  that 
my  other  auditors  stood  in  a  more  remote  relation  to  me. 
Certain  appeals  to  my  teaching,  certain  allusions  to  the 
practice  of  the  students  and  to  their  position  of  relative  de- 
pendence and  inferiority  of  age  or  acquaintance  with  the 
world,  of  little  or  no  significance  to  my  readers,  are  thus 
explained. 

I  have  not  seen  any  way  of  so  modifying  these  lectures 
as  to  suit  my  feelings  and  wishes  in  the  present;  nor  could 
I  have  found  the  time  to  do  so  had  I  seen  my  way  clearly 
to  that  end.  Even  the  time  that  I  gave  to  their  prepara- 
tion for  the  Museum  course  had  to  be  taken  out  of  the 

V 


r 

hours  of  personal  teaching;  and  they  bear  the  mark  of  a 
more  temporary  consideration  on  my  part  than  would  suit 
me  had  I  from  the  first  thought  of  publishing  them. 

At  the  same  time,  there  is  always  something  in  work 
done  for  a  special  practical  purpose  which  through  its  very 
contexture  gives  a  practical  answer  to  many  questions; 
and  I  have  hoped  that  with  some  slight  modifications  and 
explanations  I  may  manage  to  make  my  readers  feel  that 
these  lectures  are  for  them.  I  need  not  add,  I  think, 
that  there  is  little  in  these  pages  that  pretends  to  be 
novel.  Indeed,  I  should  like  to  appeal  to  the  memories 
stored  in  the  consciousness  of  my  readers,  and  ask  if  their 
own  observation,  does  not  bear  me  out  in  mine. 

J.  L.  F. 
Paris.  1895- 


LECTURE   I 


ESSENTIAL  DIVISIONS  OF  THE   WORK  OF    ART 

B 


SYNOPSIS  OF  LECTURE  I 

Proposed  plan  of  the  lectures.  —  Consideration  of  what  museums 
of  art  offer  for  study.  —  Classification  of  the  kinds  of  lessons  to  be 
derived  from  their  contents.  —  Difference  between  such  a  course  of 
study  and  the  usual  practical  studies  which  must  have  preceded. — 
Why  more  specially  painting  and  sculpture  are  called  art.  —  The  artist 
expresses  what  is  in  reality  himself.  —  Personality  impossible  to  con- 
ceal in  the  work  of  art.  —  The  thought  that  makes  the  work  of 
art  not  reflection  or  reflective  thought.  —  Deficiencies  of  the  thought 
which  analyzes ;  genius  as  the  power  of  co-ordinating  innumerable 
memories. — The  record  of  memories  even  in  the  superficial  appear- 
ance of  the  work  of  art  —  Many  essential  characteristics  inseparable 
from  the  work  of  art  must  be  lost  to  us  in  certain  cases.  —  Style  is 
living  form.  —  Certain  forms  consequently  impossible  to  imitate.  — 
Ruysdael  and  Millet.  —  What  happens  when  methods  are  separated 
from  sentiment.  —  What  happens  to  imitators.  —  Loss  of  the  mean- 
ing and  influence  of  the  work  of  art  when  it  has  been  made  to  appeal 
especially  to  momentary  interests.  —  Rules  exist  for  art,  not  art  for 
rules.  —  But  art  is  a  language  and  has  a  grammar  which  varies  only 
as  language  varies.  —  Preparation  of  the  artist  for  the  free  world  that 
he  creates.  —  We  help  him  to  make  it :  and  taste  may  be  a  form  of 
genius.  —  Possibility  of  living  in  the  work  of  others.  —  Li  what  true 
originality  consists.  —  What  we  learn  to  know  is  men. 

8  ^ 


LECTURE  I 

ESSENTIAL   DIVISIONS   OF   THE   WORK   OF  ART 


It  is  my  intention,  in  the  lectures  which  I 
begin  to-day,  to  supplement  and  to  accentuate, 
in  a  more  fixed  and  reasoned  form,  the  teach- 
ings which  I  give  to  my  students  in  a  practical 
way.  Whether  they  be  written  out  in  literary 
shape,  or  abandoned  to  the  chance  form  of  an 
tv  ordinary  talk,  they  will  be  meant  to  explain  the 
philosophy  of  usual  teaching.  Sometimes  what 
I  shall  have  to  say  may  seem  rather  formal, 
somewhat  abstract,  perhaps  thereby  a  little  tire- 
some. At  other  times  I  shall  be  forced  into 
details  which  are  best  given  in  the  least  con- 
ventional manner;  and  thereby  I  may  seem  to 
be  stepping  down  from  a  higher  plane.  But  these 
difficulties  are  inherent  in  the  nature  of  the  case, 

and    in    the    unaccustomed    position   which    the 

3 


4  LECTURE  i 

artist  takes  when  he  attempts  to  give  explana- 
tions in  words  of  what  he  thinks  without  words. 

I  shall  begin  by  some  reference  to  the  differ- 
ences between  such  a  course  of  study  as  this  one 
which  we  have  undertaken  in  connection  with 
the  collections  of  a  museum,  and  the  usual  prac- 
tical studies  which  must  have  preceded  ours. 

I  should  then  like  to  consider  what  museums 
of  art  offer  for  study,  and  to  analyze  and  classify 
the  kinds  of  lessons  to  be  derived  from  their 
contents ; 

Also  to  consider  how  the  artist  has  expressed 
his  view  of  the  world,  how  he  has  seen  it,  with 
what  body  and  senses,  what  hereditary  memo-  « 
ries,  what  memories  of  acquired  liking,  what 
development  of  memory  through  study,  and  what 
personal  combination  of  all  these  factors ; 

To  consider  next  how  museums  are  collections 
of  works  by  such  men  of  all  periods,  who  fully 
made  use  of  all  these  means;  how  they  contain, 
moreover,  things  left  by  imitators  of  such  works, 
who  only  used  part  of  these  means  of  memory. 

In  such  an  analysis  I   should  try  to   explain 


/ 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  & 

what  the  principles  of  these  studies  might  be. 
These  various  considerations  I  shall  repeat  in 
different  ways,  from  different  points  of  view; 
more  especially  in  these  lectures  at  the  beginning. 

I  also  propose  to  inquire  as  to  the  way  in 
which  things  that  interest  us  through  sight  are 
seen,  and  what  is  our  sight,  and  how  we  use  it 
in  the  art  of  painting.  And  perhaps,  if  there 
be  time,  I  may  call  the  attention  of  my  students 
to  what  painters  and  other  artists  have  said  about 
their  arts,  and  connect  these  statements  with  our 
studies.  The  difficulty  for  the  artist  who  works 
in  things  to  put  his  thoughts  into  words  is  a 
natural  difficulty,  and  much  of  what  we  shall 
study  together  will  make  the  causes  of  it  evi- 
dent. Efforts  made  in  any  one  direction  are  made 
at  the  expense  of  our  being  able  equally  well  to 
carry  out  others  of  a  different  kind ;  the  artist's 
nature  has  warned  him  of  the  loss,  and  his  usual 
willingness  to  be  satisfied  without  words  is  not 
misplaced. 

What  I  shall  have  to  say  to  you  will  be  ad- 
dressed more  especially  to  my  students,  whether 


6  LECTURE  I^ 

or  not  I  may  have  repeated  these  points,  their 
derivations  and  conclusions,  to  them,  during  the 
course  of  lesson^,  or  whether  I  have  merely  im- 
plied them. 

I  have  come  into  addressing  you  upon  these 
matters  through  having  been  chosen  by  the  Mu- 
seum to  help  in  securing,  by  organized  study, 
an  extension  and  a  more  certain  result  of  the 
advantages  offered  to  every  one  in  its  collec- 
tions. This  choice  might  as  well  have  fallen 
upon  one  of  many  other  artists,  and  all  that  I 
can  hope  is  that  I  may  be  able  to  do  as  well 
as  any  of  the  others  of  whom  I  think. 

The  methods  of  teaching  used  in  schools, — 
which,  taking  a  pupil  as  he  may  be  found,  begin 
with  him,  if  necessary,  at  the  beginning,  place 
unknown  tools  in  his  hands,  teach  him  quite  as 
much  the  use  of  his  body  (of  his  hands,  I  mean, 
and  his  eyes)  as  of  his  mind,  prepare  him  gradu- 
ally to  know  that  there  is  a  language  that  he  can 
speak,  teach  him  its  average  alphabet,  its  average 
spelling,  its  average  grammar,  —  these  methods 
which  are  meant  for  the  child  have  limitations 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  7 

unsuitable  to  an  older  and  better  informed  stage 
of  mind.  In  the  first  place,  any  form  of  obedience 
is  good  for  the  pupil.  When  he  has  learnt  to 
obey,  it  is  well,  both  for  him  and  for  others, 
to  learn  if  the  path  that  he  has  chosen  is  one 
that  is  suited  to  him.  First  instructions,  then, 
take  in  those  who  are  to  go  on,  and  those  who 
are  to  remain  by  the  wayside,  or  who  may 
turn  into  other  paths.  Meanwhile  a  lower  aver- 
age of  instruction  must  necessarily  be  kept  to, 
where  so  many  are  included. 

It  is  also  certain  that  the  better  the  earlier 
training,  the  more  certain  and  easy  will  be  the 
later  culture.  There  must  be  good  grammar 
schools,  there  must  be  good  preparatory  educa- 
tion for  those  who,  looking  to  the  less  fixed 
culture  to  be  gained  through  the  university, 
will  need  at  first  some  definite  discipline,  even 
though  it  may  be  rigid  or  narrow,  that  they 
may  be  steadied  for  the  greater  liberty  that 
shall  open  before  them,  when,  as  in  the  teach- 
ings of  universities,  they  are  shown  the  contra- 
dictions  of  systems   of   knowledge,  and,  for  the 


8  LECTt(BE  I 

advantage  of  their  present  and  their  future,  are 
made  acquainted  with  the  diversity  of  the  past. 
The  schools,  therefore,  which  exist  for  the  ad- 
vantage of  tlie  beginner,  and  which  are  based 
upon  an  exclusive  adherence  to  a  single  teach- 
ing, are  necessary.  Such  considerations  as  our 
present  course  will  open  to  us  could  not  be 
approached,  and  certainly  could  not  be  under- 
stood, without  a  fair  practical  acquaintance  with 
the  ordinary  grammar  of  the  art  of  painting. 
What  we  wish  to  consider  together  is  this : 
what  freedom  there  may  be  in  the  application 
of  the  tools  which  we  have  learnt  to  use.  In- 
stead of  an  alphabet  of  letters,  instead  of  a 
knowledge  of  the  meaning  of  words  taken  sepa- 
rately, we  wish  to  see  how  we  can  assemble 
these  different  parts  that  constitute  our  speech, 
and  use  them  for  that  form  of  communication 
which  is  best  suited  to  individual  capacities.  In 
the  study  of  literature,  in  the  study  of  the  use 
of  written  words,  we  should  be  shown  how  men 
whose  success  had  been  more  or  less  established 
by  time,  managed  the  mechanism  of  language. 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  9 

Examples  of  well-used  language  would  be  laid 
before  us,  and  we  should  be  called  upon  to  take 
lessons  from  them,  and  to  admire  the  felicity 
of  a  success  whose  means  we  could  now  begin 
to  understand.  From  all  this  acquaintance  with 
the  past  we  should  gather  a  knowledge  of  the 
limitations  attending  any  particular  develop- 
ment, and  of  the  extent  and  powers  of  such 
uses  of  the  ordinary  means  that  are  common 
to  all  of  us.  Each  individual  mind  would  find 
some  particular  food  best  suited  to  its  essential 
constitution ;  nor  should  we  fear  that  an  intimate 
knowledge  of  what  had  before  been  done  by  man 
would  hamper  us;  except  in  the  sense  that  all 
knowledge  is  a  weight  to  carry,  as  is  all  baggage, 
as  is  all  food,  as  are  all  means  of  protection  and 
all  engines  of  survey  and  of  industry.  Not  only 
do  we  obtain,  then,  a  useful  material,  but  our 
minds  are  enlarged  by  having  to  fit  into  spaces 
larger  than  those  we  knew  before ;  and  the  fact 
that  these  works  of  men  which  we  study  or  ad- 
mire contain,  in  some  mysterious  way,  the  inform- 
ing principle  which  shaped  them,  brings  us  into  a 


10  LECTURE  I 

warm  and  living  contact  with  the  being  of  their 
makers.  We  gain  some  of  their  life ;  we  are 
carried  forward  by  tlieir  desires. 

Nor  does  it  matter  that  these  things  done  are 
the  work  of  men  of  whom  we  speak  as  no  longer 
living.  They  are  always  the  work  of  the  ma- 
jority of  men ;  for  the  dead  outnumber  the  living. 
And  we  are  as  close  to  human  nature  when  with 
them,  as  we  are  to  the  human  nature  that  moves 
for  this  brief  moment  around  us.  Some  of  these 
men  live  in  books.  In  places  like  this  Museum, 
we  know  them  in  painting  or  in  sculpture,  —  in 
the  forms  of  art  more  especially  called  art^  be- 
cause, perhaps,  in  painting  and  in  sculpture,  we 
see  more  distinctly  with  the  results  the  many 
means  employed  by  that  desire  of  man  which 
causes  him  to  make  what  we  call  the  beautiful. 
In  our  art  of  painting,  above  all  others,  that 
desire  of  the  beautiful  is  expressed  and  appeased 
by  representation  of  what  is  exterior  —  what  is 
perceived  by  the  sense  of  sight.  Through  these 
representations,  more  or  less  complete,  more  or 
less  the  result  of  acquired  ideas,  or,  on  the  other 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  11 

hand,  of  personal  impressions,  the  artist  has  ex- 
pressed what  is  in  reality  himself.  If  we  were 
gifted  with  the  imaginary  perception  that  we 
attribute  to  supernatural  beings,  we  could  see 
written  out  at  length,  in  these  works  of  art,  not 
only  the  character  of  their  authors,  but  their 
momentary  feelings,  often  contradictory  to  the 
apparent  intention;  and  even  their  physical  fail- 
ings —  the  make  and  habit  of  their  bodies. 

Our  form  of  art  appears  the  most  impersonal 
of  all  to  the  perceptions  of  those  who  look  upon 
its  results;  and  yet  they  and  we  usually  satisfy 
our  feelings  by  applying  to  the  work  and  its 
methods  adjectives  implying  moral  or  intellect- 
ual merits  or  demerits.  Hence  we  speak  of  the 
nobility  oi  a  man's  style;  hence  we  speak  of  the 
sincerity  of  a  work  of  art. 

In  reality,  as  I  was  saying,  the  art  of  painting 
is  perhaps  less  discreet  than  any  other.  It  gives 
most  indubitable  testimony  of  the  moral  state 
of  the  painter  at  the  very  moment  that  he 
used  his  brush.  He  has  done  what  he  wished 
to  do.     If  he   has  wished  in  a  weak  way,  it  is 


12  LECTURE  I 

possible  to  know  it  through  various  forms  of  in- 
decision. All  the  more,  that  which  he  has  not 
really  desired  is  absent  from  his  work,  —  what- 
ever he  may  say,  whatever  he  may  claim,  what- 
ever he  may  think,  and  whatever  other  people 
may  say  about  him.  Any  distraction,  any  man- 
ner of  forgetfulness,  a  less  warm  impression,  a 
less  deep  and  reaching  application  of  sight,  any 
lessening  of  industry,  any  lessening  of  his  love 
for  that  which  he  is  studying,  the  fatigue  of 
painting-  and  the  passion  of  painting, — all  these 
shades  of  his  nature,  even  to  the  intermittent 
action  of  his  sensitiveness  —  all  that  is  spread 
out  manifestly,  whether  we  recognize  it  or  not, 
in  the  works  of  a  painter,  as  sharply  if  he  had 
taken  us  into  his  confidence.* 

For  the  thought  that  makes  the  work  of  art, 
the  thought  which  in  its  highest  expression  we 
call  genius,  is  not  reflection  or  reflective  thouglit. 
The  thought  which  analyzes  has  the  same  defi- 
ciencies as  our  eye.  It  can  only  fix  one  point 
at  a  time.     It  is  necessary  for  it  to  examine  each 

*  Parapli  rased  from  Fromentin. 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  13 

element  of  consideration,  and  unite  it  to  others, 
to  make  a  whole.  But  the  process  of  /ree  life, 
which  is  the  logic  of  art,  is  like  that  process  of 
our  using  the  eye,  in  which  we  make  most  won- 
derful combinations  of  momentary  adaptation,  by 
co-ordinating  innumerable  memories,  by  rejecting 
those  that  are  useless  or  antagonistic;  and  all 
without  being  aware  of  it,  so  that  those  espe- 
cially who  most  use  the  eye,  as  for  instance  the 
painter,  or  the  hunter,  are  unaware  of  more  than 
one  single,  instantaneous  action. 

The  exercise  of  reasoning  alone,  which  is  our 
usual  way  of  defining  thought,  is,  as  I  have  just 
been  saying  in  regard  to  the  eye,  a  limitation; 
a  limitation  distinctly  perceptible  when  we  un- 
derstand with  difficulty  what  others  understand 
at  once.  And  it  may  be  that  in  the  higher  uses 
of  certain  processes  of  reasoning,  where  a  very 
high  life  has  acted  in  the  way  that  I  should 
like  to  call  genius,  the  effort  has  been  so  simple 
and  so  natural  that  the  memory  of  the  multi- 
tudinous memories  implied  has  passed  away 
Take,  for  instance,  that  charming  story  told  by 


14  LECJTURE  I 

Biot,  the  astronomer,  in  his  account  of  his  studies 
with  Laplace.  The  great  man  had  confided  to 
him  his  manuscripts  of  the  "Mdcanique  Celeste," 
and  for  a  long  time  the  young  student  had 
puzzled  over  some  passage  which  began,  "It  is 
easy  to  see  that,  etc."  To  him  it  was  not  easy 
to  see.  After  long  study  he  had  the  courage  to 
explain  his  inability  to  his  great  patron.  La- 
place looked  over  the  old  notes  and  memoranda, 
and  said,  "  Well,  I  don't  understand  it  either, 
but  there  was  a  moment,  while  I  was  at  work, 
when  it  seemed  so  simple  as  not  to  be  worth 
analyzing."  Still  more  so  in  a  work  of  art, 
executed  through  the  body  and  appealing  to 
the  mind  through  the  senses,  the  entire  make-up 
of  its  creator  addresses  the  entire  constitution  of 
the  man  for  whom  it  is  meant. 

Thus  in  any  museum  we  can  see  certain  great 
differences  in  things ;  which  are  so  evident,  so 
much  on  the  surface,  as  almost  to  be  our  first 
impressions.  They  are  the  marks  of  the  places 
where  the  works  of  art  were  born.  Climate; 
intensity  of  heat  and  of  light ;  the  nature  of  the 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  15 

earth ;  whether  there  was  much  or  little  water 
in  proportion  to  land;  plants,  animals,  surround- 
ing beings,  have  helped  to  make  these  differences; 
as  well  as  manners,  laws,  religious  and  national 
ideals.  If  you  recall  the  mere  general  physical 
impression  of  a  gallery  of  Flemish  paintings  and 
of  a  gallery  of  Italian  masters,  you  will  have 
carried  off  in  yourself  two  distinct  impressions, 
each  one  the  sum  of  all  the  impressions  received 
during  their  lives  by  the  men  of  these  two  races. 
The  fact  that  they  used  their  eyes  more  or  less 
is  only  a  small  factor  in  this  enormous  aggre- 
gation of  influences  received  by  them  and  trans- 
mitted to  us.  Outside  of  those  qualities  of  our 
minds  which  place  us  in  sympathy  with  what 
these  things  mean,  which  make  us  admire  them, 
which  make  us  feel  that  we  like  them,  which 
lead  us  to  forget  these  foreign  accents,  lies  a 
large  domain  of  relations  more  or  less  accessible, 
very  often  almost  impossible  for  us  to  appreciate. 
There  must  always  be  some  sides  in  the  work 
of  a  Greek  more  natural  to  a  Greek  than  they 
are  to  us;   even  when  the  thoughts  and   modes 


16  LECTURE  I 

of  life  of  his  race  have  become,  by  study  and 
acquired  memories,  an  intimate  part  of  our  own 
existence.  How  much  more  must  it  be  so  when 
we  look  at  the  works  of  art  of  another  great 
civilization  such  as  that  of  China  and  Japan! 
We  are  cut  off  from  the  vast  amount  of  associa- 
tions that  have  informed  the  lives  of  their  makers. 
It  is  as  if  we  read  Shakespeare  for  the  first  time, 
in  a  language  little  understood  of  us.  On  that 
side,  then,  it  is  evident — even  through  our  not 
being  able  to  understand  thoroughly — that  there 
is  something  intangible  in  this  physical  object, 
something  infinitely  mysterious. 

And  if  we  have  lost  so  many  things,  which  in 
some  cases  are  lost  forever,  of  what  seemed  to  the 
makers  of  works  of  art  in  the  past  the  very  essence 
of  their  difference  from  other  people,  what  other 
things  do  we  not  lose  when,  for  example,  in 
poetry,  the  exact  quality  of  a  single  vowel,  its 
shading  in  the  scale  of  sound,  has  so  much  expres- 
sion, so  much  importance  to  us  ?  Think  of  all  the 
combinations  of  these  simple  elements  in  the  style 
of  a  great  poet.     Each  syllable  has  a  personality 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  17 

of  its  own,  yet  exists  only  through  the  word  which 
contains  it.  Each  word  has  an  enormous  value, 
and  yet  has  none  by  itself,  but  only  as  inserted  in 
the  statement  which  itself  is  part  of  the  sentence, 
for  the  sentence  is  a  whole,  in  the  manner  of  the 
organism  of  a  living  body. 

Style  might  be  called  a  living  form  which 
the  live  spirit  wraps  around  itself.  The  art  of 
writing  contains,  then,  a  certain  science  which 
as  yet  it  has  not  been  fully  conscious  of;  but 
what  notions  for  our  own  art  are  hinted  at  by 
this  mere  glance  at  the  mechanism  of  another  art 
still  more  unconscious  than  our  own !  In  our  art 
of  painting  the  forms  of  the  language  are  more 
universal;  more  easily,  therefore,  can  we  under- 
stand this  statement  of  Fromentin  the  painter : 

"  Should  you  take  away  from  the  paintings  of 
Rubens  the  spirit,  the  variety,  the  peculiar  fitness 
of  any  touch  of  the  brush,  you  would  take  away 
a  statement  that  carries  weight  —  some  necessary 
accentuation.  Perhaps  you  might  be  taking  away 
the  one  element  which  spiritualizes  all  this  heavy 
matter,  and  transfigures  so  many  and  so  frequent 


18  LECTURE  I 

Uglinesses ;  and  that  would  be  because  you  would 
suppress  all  his  real  sensitiveness,  and,  retracing 
effects  to  their  first  cause,  you  would  kill  the  very 
life  of  the  picture  —  you  would  make  over  a  pic- 
ture that  had  no  soul.  I  could  almost  say  that 
with  each  vanishing  touch  would  disappear  a 
personal  feature  of  the  artist." 

If,  then,  the  very  surface  of  the  paint  does,  in 
the  work  of  a  great  and  skilful  painter,  literally 
embody  his  feeling,  even  more  than  the  arrange- 
ment and  cadence  of  words  carry  out  a  poet's 
feeling,  he  becomes  impossible  to  imitate  in  his 
personality,  unless  through  a  similar  sentiment  — 
as  every  one  who  has  copied  knows.  Of  course 
the  acquirements  that  he  has  memorized  in  com- 
mon with  others — the  principles  from  which  he 
works  —  these  not  being  subject  to  fluctuation,  to 
moral  and  spiritual  tides  —  these  can  be  common 
property. 

Hence  it  is  that  the  search  in  common  for  cer- 
tain truths,  for  certain  qualities,  constitutes  a 
real  school,  as  distinct  from  a  set  of  imitators. 
The  Dutchmen  tried  together  for  the  same  things, 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  19 

for  what  has  been  called  a  portraiture  of  na- 
ture; for  accuracy  and  subtlety  of  painting 
upon  an  accuracy  and  subtlety  of  drawing  which 
serves  as  a  base.  Yet  Ruysdael  is  as  different 
from  Cuyp  as  shadow  is  from  sunshine;  and  his 
grave  and  solemn  mind  gives  to  the  simplest  and 
most  commonplace  of  landscapes  a  look  of  sad  im- 
portance, which  is  almost  like  a  reproach  of  light- 
mindedness,  addressed  to  any  other  man's  work 
which  happens  to  hang  alongside.  He  is  said  to 
be  almost  impossible  to  copy  —  and  yet  his  touch 
is  not  elegant  nor  facile ;  his  very  dryness  would 
seem  so  slow  that  its  motions  could  be  followed  by 
any  patient  hand. 

Certainly  Jean  FranQois  Millet  was  no  unerring 
and  absolute  painter  like  the  great  Dutchmen; 
yet  his  name  is  recalled  to  me  by  the  severity  of 
the  mind  of  Ruysdael.  The  varying  completeness 
of  his  pictorial  work,  its  frequent  arbitrary  deci- 
sions, its  exposing  of  the  most  interior  mechanism 
of  his  methods,  might  lead  us  to  think  that  he 
could  be  imitated  with  some  success ;  but  no  one 
who  has  attempted  to  do  so  has  been  able  to  repeat 


20  LECTURE  I 

the  trial.  The  man  in  Millet  the  painter  is  too 
distinctly  behind  the  work.  According  to  his  own 
view  also,  perhaps  an  excessive  and  a  Spartan  one, 
this  was  as  it  should  be.  When  a  friend  of  mine, 
who  painted  as  well  as  any  man  of  his  school  in 
the  Paris  of  that  day,  came  to  Millet,  to  lay  all 
this  accomplishment  at  his  feet  and  ask  for  direc- 
tion, "  It  is  well,"  said  Jean  Fran9ois,  "  and  you 
can  paint. — But  what  have  you  to  say?"  ("Qu* 
avez-vous  a  dire?")  What  Millet  had  to  say  was 
based  on  the  simplest  of  foundations.  Enemies 
often,  and  doubtful  friends  sometimes,  made  of  him 
a  preacher  of  social  change,  a  person  who  used 
painting  as  a  manner  of  preaching  some  newer 
doctrine.  In  reality  Millet  could  meet  again  in 
mature  life  the  good  village  priest  who  had  first 
taught  him,  and  in  answer  to  questioning,  assure 
him  that  he  still  read  in  his  Christian  Bible  habit- 
ually, and  in  his  Virgil  sometimes.  And  perhaps 
he  could  remember  the  old  priest's  quoting,  in  an 
old-fashioned  way,  the  sentences  of  the  great 
French  bishop,  who  was  also  the  great  French 
preacher.     They  run  something  like  this.     He  is 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  21 

describing  the  time  that  saw  the  end  of  Roman 
liberty,  and  the  establishment  of  universal  empire, 
and  he  says,  "Jesus  Christ  was  born,  and  God 
gave  to  the  Romans  the  empire  of  this  world,  as  a 
gift  of  little  price."  In  the  thought  behind  these 
words  you  will  see  the  acceptance  of  suffering  and 
of  effort  in  patience,  as  part  of  the  ordering  of  the 
world.  Should  we  read  habitually  our  Christian 
Bible  in  that  meaning,  not  unmindful  of  the  Ser- 
mon on  the  Mount,  not  untouched  by  the  sad 
sweetness  of  Virgil,  we  should  be  nearer  to  being 
able  to  work  in  the  spirit  represented  by  Millet. 

It  is  hard  to  leave  off  speaking  of  men  to  praise 
whom  is  a  benediction  to  the  speaker,  and  to 
pass,  as  we  have  engaged  to  do,  into  a  consider- 
ation of  works  behind  which  the  man  is  covered 
up  or  in  hiding.  Museums  are  also  receptacles 
for  a  class  of  works,  examples  difficult  to  define 
by  analysis,  as  they  are  difficult  to  define  in  their 
reality,  unless  we  speak  of  them  as  not  belonging 
persemally  to  their  makers.  To  make  such  a  clas- 
sification in  the  forms  of  art  that  deal  with  words 
is  almost  hopeless,  and  we  can  see  the  reason  of 


22  LECTURE  I 

it  more  distinctly  after  we  have  considered  the 
question  in  our  own  art,  wherein  analysis  and 
separation  of  the  intention  and  the  method  is 
apparently  easier.  And  still  the  question  I  wish 
you  now  to  consider  is  not  an  easy  one  to  solve, 
and  when  it  is  sought  out  in  individual  examples 
it  never  can  be  absolutely  disentangled  from  the 
personal  equation  of  the  artist,  so  true  is  the 
view  that  we  have  been  considering,  which  maked 
a  work  of  art  an  expression  -of  the  man.  This 
difficulty  has  been  beautifully  expressed  by  the 
painter  whom  I  quoted  before  (and  who  is  rep- 
resented as  a  painter  on  the  walls  of  our 
Museum),  Fromentin : 

"Any  work  of  art  which  has  been  deeply  felt 
by  its  maker  is  also  naturally  well-painted.  And 
any  work  of  art  in  which  the  hand  reveals  itself 
in  felicity  or  in  splendour  is  through  that  alone 
a  work  belonging  to  the  brain,  or  has  its  origin 
in  it." 

To  many  people,  art  is  a  trade  merelj^- more 
difficult  than  others.  The  artist  to  them  is  a 
person  who  plays  with  certain   tools,   delighting 


DIVISIONS  OP  THE  WORK  OP  ART  23 

in  the  skill  which  he  can  display  in  using  them. 
But  that  is  to  confuse  art  with  the  processes  of 
art.  It  is  true  that  the  artist,  more  especially 
the  sculptor  and  the  painter,  is  a  workman; 
and  that  view  of  himself  is  a  healthy  one  for 
him,  the  more  literally  he  holds  it.  It  might 
save  him,  if  he  really  believed  in  it,  from  fre- 
quenting the  houses  of  the  rich  and  fashionable, 
and  losing  therein  his  personal  dignity.  It  would 
keep  him  from  being  accessible  to  the  influences 
of  the  moment,  of  changing  fashion,  all  the 
more  felt  in  idle  life,  and  destructive  of  higher 
taste  and  style.^  Anything  which  will  help  his 
remaining  humble  will  keep  his  work  fresh  as 
coming  from  himself  alone.  In  reality,  confu- 
sion may  occur  in  his  mind,  and  in  ours  too; 
because  his  workmanship  is  inseparable  from 
his  inclination  to  his  work.  The  child,  for  in- 
stance, stutters  before  it  speaks.  Its  intentions 
and  desires,  little  by  little,  form  its  language. 
And  art  is   a  language  —  a  •  language   made   on 

1  Cf.  VioUet  le  Due's  explanation  of  the  difficulty  of  the  artist's 
preserving  style  to-day,  unless  through  isolation. 


24  LECTURE  I 

purpose  for  the  thought  it  tries  to  express.  The 
statement  of  Fromentin  is  fully  sufficient.  It  is 
not  that  the  methods,  the  workmanship,  can  be 
detached  from  thought,  but  that  the  methods  are 
so  intimately  connected  with  it,  are  such  a  neces- 
sary instrument  of  it,  that  they  make  one  thing. 
We  can  see  what  really  happens  when  processes 
— methods — are  separated  from  sentiment.  How 
often  have  we  heard,  how  often  have  we  read : 
such  and  such  a  painting  is  in  the  first,  the 
second,  the  third  style  of  the  artist.  It  is  fre- 
quently possible  to  divide  the  periods  of  artistic 
production,  and  in  its  lower  forms  the  life  of 
'the  artist  very  often  runs  in  this  way:  In  his 
first  period  he  learns  his  methods,  re-creating 
them  for  his  own  special  iLse.  In  the  second  — 
more  or  less  a  master  of  them  —  through  them 
he  expresses  himself,  his  life,  his  creation  of  the 
world  in  his  mind.  In  the  third  —  through  some 
decadence  of  internal  life,  some  loss  of  that  vital 
faculty  which  exists  in  all  men,  and  which,  in  its 
highest  sense,  we  call  genius,  but  which  is  simply 
the  power  of  organizing  ideas,  images,  signs,  with- 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  25 

out  employing  the  slow  processes  of  apparently 
consecutive  thought :  —  by  some  beginning  of 
death,  then,  he  no  longer  expresses  himself,  but 
repeats  the  methods  which  he  has  invented;  or 
which,  in  certain  cases,  he  has  partly  assimilated 
from  others.  And  these  methods,  having  once 
been  intimately  connected  with  fnterior  life, 
recall,  through  the  ordinary  action  of  memory, 
the  impression  of  a  vitality  once  connected  with 
them ;  so  that  he  is  often  unconscious  of  the  fact 
that  all  that  he  gives  is  these  methods  belonging 
to  his  own  past,  which  no  longer  express  him  as 
he  is  to-day.  He  is  then  dead,  —  emptied.  The 
exterior  vase  remains;  the  contents  have  run 
out.  Many  a  man  has  died  on  making  the 
discovery.^  The  Baron  Gros  —  after  a  brilliant 
career,  which  largely  affected  French  art,  and 
whose  last  and  greater  echoes  died  out  in  one 
of  the  greatest  of  painters,  Delacroix  —  drowned 
himself.  Lemoine,  a  fashionable  and  successful 
painter  of  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
suspecting  a  decay  which  no  one  else  had  yet 

1  Seailles. 


26  LECTURE  I 

recognized,  ran  himself  through  with  his  sword. 
With  the  works  produced  at  these  moments  of 
an  artist's  life  the  galleries  and  collections  of  the 
world  are  full.  Sometimes  they  puzzle  us ;  usually 
we  pass  them  by. 

And  the  history  of  art  shows  us,  again,  num- 
bers of  artists  who,  grouped  around  some  greater 
men,  imitate  their  processes,  as  in  the  full  belief 
that  all  that  there  is  of  art  is  process,  or  what 
is  sometimes  called  technique. 

The  greater  man  has  made  the  dress  he  wears 
as  the  birds  make  their  plumage.  The  imitator 
imitates  the  dress.  Often,  for  a  short  time,  fame, 
success,  fortune,  attend  the  imitator ;  he  is  some- 
times, for  a  time,  more  famous  than  the  original 
he  imitates.  At  length,  with  time,  we  cannot 
understand  how  this  success  was  ever  possible. 
Have  any  of  you  seen  —  and  I  suppose  you  have 
—  the  works  of  the  painters  who  formed  the  end 
of  the  school  of  David  ?  What  do  you  think 
you  would  feel  if  you  could  be  transported  back 
to  that  date,  and  saw  the  Salon  of,  let  us  say, 
the  year  1819  ?    And  yet  the  artists  whose  works 


DIVISIONS  OP  THE  WORK  01  ART  27 

would  seem  so  uninteresting  to  you  were  intel- 
ligent men,  full  of  knowledge  of  the  methods 
they  employed;  and  nobody  around  them  gave 
them  an  idea  that  a  time  would  come  when  the 
very  existence  of  their  names  would  be  a  bore. 
And  many  of  us  who  laugh  at  them  are  no 
better  men  than  they.  They  belonged  to  their 
time ;  they  applied  current  formulas,  the  methods 
of  work  of  that  day ;  but  these  processes  were 
not  the  result  of  powerful  conviction,  the  expres- 
sion of  their  own  sentiment,  a  co-ordination  of 
the  memories  of  sight  in  a  personal  equation. 
They  were  mostly  the  records  of  the  memories 
of  the  likings  of  certain  processes.  If  processes 
still  look  fresh  and  interesting  in  the  masters, 
it  is  because  these  processes  are  intimately  con- 
nected with  personal  sentiment.  It  is  not  so 
with  the  imitators.  Once  upon  a  time,  the  fash- 
ionable form  which  they  employed  was  asso- 
ciated, in  the  minds  of  those  about  them,  with 
the  memories  of  certain  ideas,  certain  views,  cer- 
tain feelings.  Whenever,  at  that  time,  these 
forms   and  methods  were  used  by  them,  these 


28  LECTURE  I 

associated  memories  were  recalled ;  now,  to-day, 
they  can  no  longer  make  our  memories  act.  We 
still,  however,  can  feel  a  certain  pleasure,  a 
certain  curiosity,  in  these  forms  by  themselves, 
abstracted,  if  I  may  so  say,  from  the  more  im- 
portant parts  of  the  work  of  art.  I  suppo.se 
that  we  recognize  a  certain  logic,  a  certain 
fitness  of  the  stnicture  which  holds  together, 
perhaps  somewhat  as  we  like  the  balance  of 
adjustment  of  the  costumes  of  certain  old 
periods.  We  can't  wear  them,  and  we  wouldn't 
wear  them ;  but  they  hold  together  in  a  certain 
way.  This,  of  course,  I  suppose  to  be  quite 
apart  from  the  charm  we  receive  from  memories 
of  the  past  —  memories  which  already  must  be 
records  of  the  memories  of  others. 

There  are  examples  of  works  of  art,  which 
again  fill  spaces  in  museums,  where  there  is  no 
pleasure  in  looking  upon  the  process,  where  the 
process  has  been  a  poor  one  originally,  and  where 
we  can  hardly  realize,  so  poor  it  is,  that  it  is  an 
imitation.  In  fact,  we  only  realize  that  it  is  an 
imitation   because   of  the   apparent   impossibility 


"  DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  29 

that  any  strong  feeling  should  not  show,  even  in 
a  contradictory  way,  to  such  a  weak  use  of  mate- 
rial. Of  course  I  am  now  speaking  of  the  testi- 
mony of  the  work  itself.  In  judging  of  the  works 
of  painters,  or  of  the  schools,  we  help  ourselves  by 
comparison  and  by  a  knowledge  of  what  has  been 
done  at  the  time. 

Though  it  is  extremely  difficult  to  make  out 
their  origin,  the  failures,  the  works  of  art  that 
have  missed  their  point,  may  allow  us  to  dis- 
tinguish more  clearly  what  there  may  be  of  laws  in 
art  that  should  not  be  infringed.  Before  them  we 
are  no  longer  under  the  spell  of  the  undefinable, 
and  that  side  of  criticism  which  is  the  easiest,  be- 
cause it  remains  only  a  matter  of  judgment  and  a 
cold-blooded  investigation,  can  be  used  without  dis- 
turbance, under  the  pressure  of  a  certain  indigna- 
tion or  disappointment. 

It  may  happen  that  works  which  the  slow 
development  of  artistic  judgment  has  gradually 
condemned  have  been  for  a  time  just  those  which 
would  please  the  ordinary  mind ;  or  have  been 
made  to  suit  the  commonplace  critics,  who  wish 


80  LECTURE  I 

to  have  all  rules  carried  out  of  which  they  knoxo, 
and  who  are  fond  of  settling  for  good  and  for 
all  what  shall  be  done.  By  the  ordinary  mind  I 
mean  a  certain  manner  of  looking  at  things,  on 
the  part  of  people  who  consider  a  work  of  art  as 
made  to  suit  something  that  they  wish  noted, 
something  that  they  care  for  at  the  time.  When 
that  time  is  over,  and  they  themselves,  or  their 
children,  have  changed  their  views,  the  interesting 
work  of  art  meant  expressly  to  suit  them  and 
their  ideas  is  liable,  having  contained  little  else, 
to  be  passed  over  as  stupid  and  meaningless. 

Most  of  the  work  done  to  embody  the  feelings 
of  the  moment,  according  to  the  fashion  of  feeling 
at  the  moment,  loses  its  meaning  later.  If  the 
moment  be  a  grand  one,  with  little  fashion  or 
momentary  manner,  the  meaning  remains  pro- 
portionately grand.  Many  of  the  so-called  his- 
torical pictures  which  embody  official  enthusiasm, 
the  marriages  of  kings  and  queens,  the  proclama- 
tions of  certain  edicts,  the  winning  of  certain  bat- 
tles, have  little  artistic  interest  for  us  to-day,  as 
far  as  their  main  character  is  concerned ;  and  it 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  31 

is  only  when  some  fact  of  archaeology,  some  typi- 
cal portraiture,  can  be  rescued  from  them,  that 
we  think  of  them  at  all  in  the  sequence  of  the 
history  of  art. 

And  so  it  has  been  for  an  enormous  mass  of 
works  of  art  destined  for  the  use  of  religion ;  more 
properly,  perhaps,  for  the  use  of  the  clergy,  or 
for  personal  satisfaction  of  certain  types  of  the 
religious  mind,  in  which  works  Art  has  been  so 
completely  the  Handmaid  of  Religion,  that  to-day 
—  a  day  of  other  wishes  and  requests  —  looks 
upon  them  as  void  of  religious  feeling.  And  so 
they  are,  as  far  as  art  is  concerned ;  because  art 
alone  can  carry  from  age  to  age  the  personal  feel- 
ing of  the  artist,  through  which  alone  he  can 
express  religious  feeling.  Of  course  at  the  time 
many  such  things  —  I  mean  such  points  to  be 
observed  by  the  artist,  to  suit  his  patron  —  were 
matters  of  great  consequence ;  that  is  to  say,  they 
were  matters  of  great  consequence  in  the  general 
world,  which  is  a  world  of  momentary  views 
and  necessities ;  not  in  the  world  of  art.  If  the 
artist  felt  these  things  himself,  and  saw  in  them 


32  LECTURE   I 

elements  for  the  building  and  formation  of  his 
work,  then,  however  much  we  may  have  lost  the 
intention  of  the  patron  or  of  the  public  which 
the  artist  tried  to  please,  there  still  remains  the 
evidence  of  his  likings ;  there  still  remain  the 
other  less  transient  truths  which  appealed  to  him 
as  an  artist.  To-day,  far  removed  as  we  are  from 
the  external  agitation  that  troubled  the  theologies 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  we  cannot  be  moved, 
as  many  a  devout  person  then  was,  by  the  figure  of 
the  crucified  Christ,  represented  as  hanging  rigidly 
from  His  uplifted  arms,  thereby,  to  a  person  who 
looked  upon  art  as  merely  a  handmaid  of  religion, 
appearing  to  have  died  for  the  few  and  not  for 
all ;  because  the  latter  idea  required  outstretched 
arms.  You  will  see  that  this  special  verity,  if 
I  may  so  call  it  out  of  respect  for  others,  which 
the  theologian  cared  for,  is  not  the  sort  of  verity 
which  art  can  best  embody.  It  needs  explanation 
and  support  outside  of  the  statement  concerning 
it  made  by  the  artist. 

As  I  spoke,  a  moment  ago,  of  the  so-called  his- 
torical pictures   of  official  importance,  I  remem- 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE   WORK  OF  ART  33 

bered  a  name  connected  with  official  honours,  with 
official  academic  honours,  with  official  military 
honours,  with  the  voluntary  admiration  of  the 
men  of  his  time.  I  can  see  myself  long  ago,  a 
young  fellow,  sensitive  about  my  admiration,  and 
yet  with  all  due  respect  for  authority,  spending 
some  of  the  first  hours  of  my  Parisian  life  in  a 
Parisian  studio  frequented  by  well-known  men, 
and  one  influenced  by  the  great  French  power 
known  as  I'Ecole  des  Beaux-Arts.  Visitors  and 
artists  were  discussing  the  impertinence  of  a 
critic  who  had  dared  to  attack  the  great  Horace 
Verne t,  formerly  President  of  the  French  Academy, 
consequently  a  living  part  of  the  great  French 
government  school,  and  a  man  liked  by  all,  even 
by  those  to  whom  he  was  unjust,  and  whose 
names,  being  to-day  more  famous  than  his  own, 
you  all  know  by  heart.  The  question  of  per- 
sonal satisfaction  for  such  insults  to  such  a 
man  in  such  a  school,  ran  through  the  day. 
This  painter,  so  much  liked,  so  much  admired 
at   that   time   and  long   before,  represented   one 


34  LECTURE  I 

of  those  forms  of  art  which  we  are  now  consider- 
ing, —  those  forms  whose  charm  is  gone,  presum- 
ably forever,  and  over  which,  if  we  have  patience, 
we  can  talk  in  cold  blood. 

To  younger  men  this  fame  of  the  great  military 
painter  is  only  a  hearsay.  It  has  not  been  contin- 
ued with  them ;  yet  its  testimony  is  written  out  in 
the  gigantic  pamtings  which  cover  acres  of  surface 
in  the  French  galleries  and  museums.  It  is  not 
possible  to  characterize  them  in  a  few  words. 
They  escape  any  very  exact  definition,  within  a 
short  compass.  Their  methods — their  technique 
—  are  simply  the  current  processes  of  the  day, 
neither  better  nor  worse ;  what  is  more  or  less 
taught  in  the  schools,  with  certain  mildly  ambi- 
tious attempts  made  long  after  the  great  attempts 
of  the  century  had  been  made  by  others  —  by  men 
not  of  the  school,  in  feeling  at  least. 

As  to  the  feeling,  the  poetry  of  these  works  of 
art,  some  of  you  may  have  seen  it  in  innumerable 
pictures  by  all  sorts  of  people.  There  is  one  well- 
known  painting  of  Vemet,  perfectly  expressing 
the  t3^e,  —  the  dead  body  of  a  lancer,  lying  so 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OP  ART  35 

flat  that  we  are  supposed  to  be  on  his  level ;  and 
above  him  his  horse,  of  the  approved  cavalry  type, 
who  waves  one  leg  over  him,  and  puts  down  his 
head  towards  him  in  affection  and  personal  regret. 
Somewhere  else,  as  a  less  important  member  of  a 
theatrical  troupe, ,  a  little  dog  barks.  This,  and 
similar  pictures  by  him  or  by  others,  have  natu- 
rally inundated  the  world.  The  great  battle  pict- 
ures I  should  prefer  to  have  you  go  and  see 
yourself,  rather  than  attempt  to  think  them  over 
again.  But  I  think  that  you  would  enjoy  with 
me  the  small  work,  —  the  illustrations  made 
for  books  by  this  important  man,  at  night, 
at  moments  of  leisure,  during  the  progress  of 
large  works, — which  show  what  he  really  was, 
how  he  had  kept  from  boyhood  all  such  good- 
natured  likings  as  a  boy  might  have  —  a  delight 
in  animals,  a  delight  in  soldiers.  These  likings, 
being  those  of  a  boy,  were  best  expressed  and  ren- 
dered in  his  little  drawings  and  sketches  and 
lithographs,  which  are  as  full  as  his  big  and 
illustrious  paintings  are  empty. 

His  error,  then,  had  been  to  consider  that  he 


36  LECTURE  I 

was  obliged  to  do  great  things ;  and  we  might 
speak  of  him  as  a  man  who  had  mistaken  his 
scale.  Of  course  this  is  only  an  intellectual  mis- 
take, perhaps  a  little  of  a  moral  one ;  looked  at 
from  another  point  of  view,  the  companion  of 
kings  and  emperors,  and  great  people  of  all  kinds, 
the  head  of  one  of  the  greatest  schools  in  the 
world,  a  man  known  to  everybody,  from  the  great- 
est painters  to  the  last  school-boy  or  the  sweep 
who  gazed  at  pictures  in  shop-windows,  —  that 
man  might  be  called  a  great  success.  And  it 
seems,  or  ought  to  seem,  very  sad  that  probably 
few  of  you  young  people  have  heard  of  him. 

Nor  has  the  attempt  to  make  a  successful 
work  of  art,  by  carrying  out  rules  taken  from 
the  outside  —  taken  from  academies  or  professors 
of  the  beautiful,  given  to  the  work  of  art  any 
longer  life.  No  genius  for  painting  has  ever 
been  given  by  a  knowledge  of  perspective  or  a 
theory  of  colour.  The  usual  belief,  the  proverbial 
one,  is  the  belief  that  we  all  come  to,  that  rules 
exist  for  art,  not  art  for  rules. 

To  study  any  organism  we  take  it  to  pieces, 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE   WORK  OF  ART  37 

and  usually  discover  its  machinery  more  dis- 
tinctly in  death.  A  readjustment  and  juxtaposi- 
tion of  the  elements  that  constituted  life  does 
not  give  life  again  and  make  a  living  unity. 
The  work  made  by  the  reflective  and  analytic  ca- 
pacity is  entirely  comprehended  by  that  same 
capacity,  but  before  the  work  of  genius,  the 
living  work,  as  before  life  itself,  we  are  not  able 
to  express  adequately  our  sensations,  nor  can 
our  reason  feel  sure  of  a  complete  analysis.  We 
feel  that  the  charm  that  took  hold  of  our  soul 
has  not  been  sufficiently  conveyed  through  our 
words.  And  yet  that  charm  has  made  us  believe 
that  we  understood  it.  We  have  never  been 
conscious  of  any  effort.  That  effort,  which  some 
minds  might  take  for  admiration,  is  what  we 
feel  in  presence  of  works  of  exterior  importance 
in  regard  to  technique,  or  processes  unallied  to 
feeling.  But  the  effort  ends  in  a  feeling  of 
offence,  whose  cause  is  that  sort  of  coldness  which 
irritates  us  in  the  dilettante.  His  manner  is 
calculated  for  its  effects  upon  us  ;  what  we  see 
in  him  and   he  wishes  us  to  see,  is  not  himself 

•  faff  "Tfe 


38  LECTURE  I 

as  he  is,  but  the  clever  man  he  wishes  to  appear. 
He  is  afraid  to  give  himself  away,  forgetting, 
as  I  said  before,  that  he  cannot  help  it.  If  he 
arranges  himself,  if  he  thinks  of  himself,  though 
we  do  not  discern  him  clearly  in  reality,  we  see 
that  he  is  trying  to  impose  upon  us. 

If  he  is  skilful  in  his  technique  and  methods, 
we  observe,  in  a  variety  of  purely  intellectual 
pleasure,  what  he  was  after,  and  how  he  has 
done  it.  It  is  as  if  we  followed  the  reasonings 
and  excuses  that  he  has  made  out  for  himself, 
and  which  we  approve  of  or  otherwise  as  we  do 
of  the  carrying  out  of  a  school  exercise. 

But  all  the  time  we  are  fully  aware  of  the 
fact  that  there  may  be  more  art  —  that  there  is 
more  art  —  in  the  play  of  a  child  than  in  the 
careful  structure  of  many  a  learned  verse-maker. 

Let  there  be  no  misunderstanding:  Art  is  not 
a  lawless  game :  even  want  of  power  in  the 
artist  puts  up  unwillingly  with  incorrection, 
unless  he  be  deceived  by  vanity.  In  his  work 
the  real  man  forgets  himself  and  any  small 
pride  —  clearly   or  obscurely  feeling  that  to   try 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OP  ART  39 

to  find  originality  is  a  sure  way  of  losing  one's 
path. 

In  all  of  the  greatest  artists  there  is  a  humble 
workman  who  knows  his  trade  and  likes  it.  Art 
is  a  language  and  has  a  grammar  that  varies 
only  as  languages  vary  —  and  for  its  practice 
there  must  be  an  acquired  facility,  a  certain 
combination  of  observed  laws.  Upon  many  of 
its  departments  the  cooler  reason  can  pronounce. 
There  are  questions  even  in  such  complex  mat- 
ters as  composition,  in  such  delicate  matters  as 
unity  and  sequence  of  thought,  where  reasoning 
finds  its  place.  But  tendency  and  enthusiasm 
precede  work.  "  Genius,"  says  the  French  phrase, 
"is  a  protracted  patience."  (Le  genie  est  une 
longue  patience.)  It  can  only  keep  up  its  life 
by  continuous  effort,  often  by  work  so  exclusive 
as  to  make  all  other  ideas  of  life  disappear.  But 
we  must  remember  that  we  are  so  enslaved  by 
the  idea  of  time  which  we  measure  in  small 
instalments,  according  to  other  necessities,  that 
we  do  not  perceive  that  these  efforts  are  really 
one  single  act  —  the  act  of  life.     The  artist  has 


40  LECTURE  I 

this  consciousness  more  exactly  than  we  have, 
however  obscurely,  and  feels  not  so  distinctly  the 
succession  of  his  efforts  as  their  general  tendency. 
And  so  for  the  work  that  he  carries  out,  he 
rarely  sympathizes  with  the  surprise  —  still  less 
with  the  admiration  of  the  outside  world,  which 
speaks  of  the  length  of  time  that  such  a  work  of 
art  has  cost.  Be  it  a  short  moment  or  a  term  of 
years,  it  has  cost  the  same  thing,  i.e.  the  whole 
man.^  When  he  steps  into  the  outside  world 
he  can  see  the  matter  gauged  by  other  measure- 
ments. As  a  good  citizen,  as  a  family  man,  as 
working  for  a  patron,  he  can  divide  what  he 
has  done  into  some  succession  of  efforts.  .  .  . 
In  the  progress  of  his  life  at  first  there  is 
the  instinct,  the  inherited  disposition ;  then  the 
accumulated  memories  of  images,  which  give 
him   a  language   for   his   sentiment.     The    tend- 

•  Cf.  Mr.  Whistler's  well  known  answer  in  court.  "  Question : 
♦  The  labour  of  two  days,  then,  is  that  for  which  you  ask  two  hundred 
guineas  ? '  Answer  (Mr.  Whistler)  :  '  No.  I  ask  it  for  the  knowledge 
of  a  life-time.' "  Also  the  answer  of  Kiosai,  the  Japanese  artist. 
When  exception  was  taken  to  the  price  he  had  put  upon  his  painting 
of  a  crow,  he  replied  :  '*  This  is  not  a  price  for  a  painting  of  a  crow, 
bat  a  price  fur  my  hard  study  for  several  tens  of  years." 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OF  ART  41 

ency  to  translate  these  by  the  hand  decides 
the  destiny  of  the  painter.  But  his  instinct 
is  not  like  that  of  lower  forms  of  life,  ap- 
parently fixed  in  a  structure  definitely  adjusted. 
For  each  new  work  he  has  to  readjust  him- 
self. Through  long  work  he  tends  more  and 
more  to  fix  the  tendencies  of  heredity  or  in- 
dividual chance.  He  prepares  the  instrument 
which  shall  answer,  by  an  impressive  sign,  the 
motion  of  his  mind.  Thus  will  the  musician 
study  harmony,  composition,  the  masters  of  the 
past,  so  as  not  to  have  to  think  separately  of 
them;  so  as  to  create  a  world  of  memories 
which  dispense  him  from  reflective  action,  and 
become  as  a  habit,  that  he  may  be  fully  free 
when  the  time  comes  for  action. 

This  free  world  that  he  creates  escapes  the 
chances  of  the  exterior  world  in  which  he  lives. 
And  it  is  that  world  of  his  into  which  we 
enter,  really  taking  part  in  its  making  over 
again.  For  the  pleasure  given  by  art  is  not 
a  passive  one.  We  give  it  to  ourselves.  It 
has  been  well  said  that  what  we  call  taste  is  a 


42  LECTURE  I 

real  art.  The  work  of  art  may  remain  silent 
to  many ;  even  to  those  who  understand  it 
more  or  less.  It  is  an  appeal  to  another  mind, 
and  it  cannot  draw  out  more  than  that  mind 
i, contains.  But  to  enjoy  is  as  it  were  to 
create ;  to  understand  is  a  form  of  equality,  and 
the  full  use  of  taste  may  be  an  act  of  genius. 

We  each  see  in  the  work  of  the  artist  a  worl? 
more  or  less  different  according  to  our  natures. 
Nor  can  we  enjoy  equally  all  works  of  art. 
We  cannot  at  will  take  up  all  the  postures  of 
the  mind  of  another.  But  we  are  not  under 
an  illusion  when  we  feel  pride  in  the  enjoy- 
ment of  beauty;  and  they  are  excusable  who 
feel  as  if  they  had  made  the  work  which  they 
admire.  They  become,  for  an  instant,  the  man 
who  made  it  and  who  is  at  his  best  very 
often  ;  and  they  feel  that  they  are  better  than 
themselves.  The  artist  whom  we  admire  cannot 
be  indifferent  to  us;  witness  the  way  in  which 
we  take  his  part,  often  with  more  zeal  than 
he  would  have  had  himself;  because  for  the 
moment  it   is   in  us  and  owing   to   us  that  his 


DIVISIONS  OF  THE  WORK  OP  AET  43 

work  lives.  During  these  moments  we,  the 
spectators,  live  a  serene  and  complete  existence. 

And  so,  by  melting  one's  self  into  the  methods 
and  the  reasons  for  the  methods  of  masters,  one 
would  feel  less  inclined  to  have  one's  own  way; 
which  is  very  different  from  going  in  one's  own 
way.  And  we  students,  we  who  study  together, 
may  see  that  originality  does  not  consist  in  look- 
ing like  no  one  else,  but  merely  in  causing  to  pass 
into  our  own  work  some  personal  view  of  the 
world  and  of  life. 

If  you  have  understood  me,  you  will  see  that  all 
these  are  men  whom  you  learn  to  know;  —  and 
there  is  little  else  that  counts.  Yet  as  they  are 
part  of  nature,  which  may  be  defined  for  you  to 
be  what  lies  outside  of  yourself,  and  not  your  own 
consciousness  —  so  what  they  have  done  is  a  part 
of  nature.  And  in  fact,  most  of  that  nature  seen 
by  their  eyes  would  not  have  been  seen  by  you 
had  it  not  been  for  them.  Each  of  the  greater 
ones,  each  of  the  greater  schools,  has  chosen  some 
part  of  the  world  of  sight  to  insist  upon  and 
delight  in.     The  even  blue  sky  not  fully  lit,  in 


44  LECTURE  I 

which  float  masses  of    grey  and   golden   cloud, 
recalls  to  us  painters  the  name  of  Veronese. 

"To  bathe  all,  even  light  itself,  in  a  bath  of 
shadow,  from  which  it  might  emerge  more  wet 
and  more  glimmering;  to  make  these  waves  of 
obscurity  sweep  around  the  lit  surfaces ;  to  vary, 
to  deepen  and  to  thicken  the  flood,  and  yet  to 
make  obscurity  visible  and  shadow  easy  to  see 
through  "  —  such  was  the  method  of  Rembrandt, 
in  which  he  worked  with  a  perfection  so  complete 
that  even  nature's  use  of  similar  mystery  bears 
his  name. 


LECTURE  II 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE 


SYNOPSIS  OF  LECTURE  H 

Examples  of  original  artistic  life  beginning  from  study  of  works 
of  art.  —  The  memories  and  practice  of  the  studio  necessarily  carried 
out  of  doors. — Danger  of  confusion  of  practices  with  principles. 
—  Methods  are  but  tools.  — There  is  no  absolute  way  of  painting. — 
The  artist  is  judged  by  the  appreciation  of  the  way  he  looks  upon 
the  world.  — There  is  no  absolute  nature :  there  can  bfl  no  absolute 
view  of  nature.  —  Practically  there  is  no  such  thing  as  Realism. — 
How  differently  painters  might  look  at  the  same  subject.  —  For  each 
variation  some  special  translation  by  the  hand  :  for  each  variation  by 
the  hand  some  modification  in  the  use  of  materials. 


LECTURE  n 

PERSONALITY   AND   CHOICE 

In  my  first  lecture  I  said  that  the  various  con- 
siderations announced  in  our  beginning,  should  be 
repeated  in  various  ways,  from  different  points  of 
view,  as  they  will  lead  us  gradually  to  all  the 
points  of  study  which  you  can  require,  and  may 
even  help  us  to  the  furthest  and  finest  details  of 
processes  or  of  what  is  sometimes  called  technique. 

You  will  remember  that  we  divided  works  of 
art  into  two  large  classes,  making  the  division  by 
their  essential  constitutions. 

In  the  one  we  placed  works  in  which  the  artist 
had  used  the  personal  combination  of  all  possible 
factors ;  showing  us  how  he  expressed  his  view  of 
the  world,  how  he  had  seen,  with  what  body  and 
senses,  what  hereditary  tendencies,  what  memories 

47 


48  LECTURE  n 

of  acquired  liking,  what  development  of  memory 
through  study,  and  what  personal  colouring. 

In  the  other  division  we  had  placed  those  who 
had  used  part  of  these  means,  and  noticed  that 
this  division  would  contain  things  by  imitators  of 
such  works  as  those  just  classed,  who  only  used  a 
part  of  these  means  of  memory. 

We  saw  how  in  the  former  works  the  artist  had 
expressed  himself.  We  noticed  that  the  search  in 
common  for  certain  truths,  for  certain  qualities, 
constituted  a  real  school,  as  distinct  from  a  set  of 
imitators. 

As  an  example  of  great  value  I  cited  the  Dutch 
school :  and  in  that  school,  bound  together  by  very 
strict  interpretation  of  nature  —  by  what  has  been 
called  a  portraiture  of  nature,  —  I  reminded  you 
how  dijfferent  Cuyp  was  from  Ruysdael,  and  how 
distinct  and  individual  was  Ruysdael's  character 
within  the  methods  of  the  school. 

I  also  cited  Millet  in  connection  with  Ruysdael, 
and  pointed  out  the  former  as  a  type  of  a  most 
distinct  expression  of  personality  seen  through 
and  behind  methods.     We  then  passed  from  ex- 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  49 

amples  of  the  full  life  of  the  artist  to  examples 
of  deficient  representation,  such  as  are  shown  in 
the  works  of  imitators,  such  as  are  shown  in  the 
works  of  those  who  work  for  the  public,  and  to 
meet  the  desires  of  others,  which  are  not  fully 
their  own. 

I  cited  certain  tji^es  of  official  painting,  of  his- 
torical pictures  and  so-called  religious  pictures; 
and  among  historical  painters,  so-called,  I  referred 
to  the  former  fame  of  Horace  Vernet,  and  to  the 
particular  error  represented  by  him,  that  of  mis- 
application of  scale,  he  having  been  a  charming 
designer  in  small,  an  excellent  book-illustrator 
and  caricaturist,  while  his  big  and  once  famous 
paintings  have  come  to  be  considered  empty  fail- 
ures.^    The  cause  of  the  error  of  works  of  art 

I I  took  the  famous  Horace  only  as  a  type  which  happened  to  be 
handy  —  not  as  an  especial  or  necessary  example. 

You  will  remember  how  I  referred  to  the  theatrical  quality  of  some 
of  his  work.  This  theatrical  element  enters  somewhat  into  many 
works  of  art,  and  must  always  have  been  an  element.  We  see  it,  for 
example,  in  the  works  of  Hokusai,  the  Japanese,  where  it  distorts  the 
expression  of  his  love  of  nature. 

But  it  may  be  worth  noting  in  the  direction  of  our  reflections  of 
last  week,  that  the  fashion  of  the  theatre  changes,  and  that  to-day  the 
opera  expression  of  fifty  years  ago,  reflected  in  pictures,  looks  rather 

B 


60  LECTURE  n 

based  upon  academic  formulas  was  then  consid- 
ered, the  cause  being  the  impossibility  of  building 
together  the  elements  of  a  work  of  art  which  had 
been  obtained  through  cold-blooded  dissection  of 
former  living  masterpieces. 

Certain  insufficiencies  of  mere  technique  were 
considered  in  various  ways,  to  be  summed  up  in  the 
usual  belief  that  rules  and  methods  exist  for  art  — 
not  art  for  rules. 

An  analysis  was  given  of  the  growth  of  the 
painter,  from  his  earliest  tendencies  to  the  studies 
which  allow  him  to  be  himself.  In  this  work 
created  by  him  as  a  mere  mode  of  life,  we  are  able 
to  live  in  the  world  that  he  has  made,  and  to 
enjoy  it,  and  in  a  certain  way  to  make  it  over 
ourselves;  because  enjoyment  is  another  form  of 
creation,  and  taste  is  a  form,  perhaps,  of  genius. 
In  this  existence  in  common  with  the  painter  there 
is  a  form  of  study  which  could  be  completed  by 

absurd  to  us,  who  are  accustomed  to  more  complex  and  studied 
staging.  So  later  the  Wagnerian  influence  will  seem  as  absurd,  and 
theatrical  solemnities  of  to-day  reflected  in  painting  will  appear  as 
they  are  in  reality,  stage  arrangements  made  to  suit  a  very  average 
taste  —  for  which  we  are  all  a  little  responsible. 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  51 

effort,  so  as  to  bid  good-bye  to  such  a  narrow  view 
as  having  one's  own  way ;  and  to  obtain  the  real 
originality  of  walking  in  one's  own  path ;  and  to 
express  what  art  is  meant  for :  the  representation 
of  the  artist's  view  of  the  world.  And  the  works 
of  the  past,  having  been  made  by  man,  who  is  a 
part  of  nature,  and  nature  being  what  is  outside 
of  yourself,  these  works  of  art  are  parts  of  nature. 
And  indeed,  each  great  artist  and  each  great  school 
has  chosen  some  part  of  nature  which  is  subject  to 
sight,  as  a  matter  of  study  and  delight;  so  that 
without  them  it  might  be  said  that  we  should  not 
have  learned  to  see  nature  in  those  details :  as, 
for  instance,  the  light  in  which  Veronese  painted, 
which  we  artists  recognize  in  the  sky  of  certain 
days  ;  and  the  methods  of  the  chiaroscuro  of  Rem- 
brandt, so  completely  stated  by  him  in  his  paint- 
ings, that  his  name  is  attached  to  this  expression 
of  nature  herself. 

In  such  admiration  of  certain  men,  in  some 
realization  of  how  they  have  seen  certain  sides  of 
natm-e,  we  see  nature  better  —  we  see  it  limited, 
if  I  may   so   say,   prepared   for  us,   so  that  we 


52  LECTURE  II 

can  take  hold  of  it  —  grasp  it  —  enjoy  it  without 
confusion. 

At  the  same  time,  we  can  rejoice  in  their  ren- 
dering, and  in  an  artistic  development  continue  it ; 
if  we  do  so  sincerely,  not  as  imitators  but  as  en- 
joyers,  we  can  find  for  ourselves  some  corner  of 
these  great  pasturelands  which  will  or  may  become 
our  own. 

In  any  such  study,  any  such  delight,  it  is  pos- 
sible to  extend  one's  self  in  a  personal  develop- 
ment which  might  almost  make  us  —  those  of  us 
who  are  not  the  makers  —  disbelieve  in  the  fact  of 
such  a  new  and  true  life  having  been  begun  from 
mere  works  of  art. 

Thus  the  group  of  French  artists  whose  general 
tendencies  are  most  splendidly  represented  by 
Rousseau,  the  landscape  painter,  began  to  see 
nature,  the  ordinary  French  nature  around  them, 
with  young  and  fresh  eyes,  with  newly  discovered 
interests,  almost  as  if  they  had  foimd  a  new  world 
at  their  very  doors,  without  forgetting,  for  a  long 
time,  the  impression  of  the  great  Dutchmen.  The 
conventionalities  of  Holland  helped  them  to  dis- 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  53 

cover  France.  They  began  with  admiration  of 
the  portrait  feeling  of  the  Dutch,  with  the  Dutch 
acceptance  of  things  as  they  were,  with  what 
seemed  to  them  a  departure  from  the  arbitrary 
classicality  of  their  own  French  school.  They 
admired  and  they  imitated  the  solidity  of  make 
of  these  northern  paintings,  as  well  as  the  placid- 
ity of  their  subjects,  the  apparent  absorption  of 
the  artist  in  his  result,  and  they  began  by  imitat- 
ing the  surfaces  of  these  representations  of  nature. 
With  a  man  like  Rousseau,  continually  in  love 
with  each  thing  that  he  saw,  unwilling  to  elim- 
inate or  simplify,  because  he  could  not  put  aside 
one  love  for  another,  the  result  became  as  com- 
plex, as  multitudinous,  as  the  results  of  the  Dutch- 
men's likings  were  simple  and  self-contained. 

But  throughout,  wherever,  as  is  necessary  in 
painting,  which  is  eminently  a  conventional  art, 
there  were  passages  in  nature  that  reminded  him  of 
his  old  loves  in  Holland  —  I  mean  the  Holland  of 
pictures ;  wherever  he  had  to  supply,  as  we  all  have, 
the  insufficiency  of  observation  by  the  procedures 
of  mechanism,  there  Rousseau's  filiation  from  the 


64  LECTURE  n 

Dutch  is  evident  and  often  beautiful.  He  holds 
the  past  by  the  hand,  however  far  he  may  stretch 
towards  newer  gains,  newer  ambitions,  unknown, 
or  apparently  unknown,  to  his  more  peaceful  pic- 
torial ancestors,  the  Dutch  painters  that  he  loved. 

Corot,  a  greater  lover  of  Italy,  a  less  naive 
lover  of  nature,  less  willing  to  accept  all  the 
blemishes  of  his  beloved,  and  preferring  to  see 
her  reflected  in  himself,  passed  away  from  these 
early  tendencies,  but  never  from  their  principle. 
Not  the  things  themselves,  but  the  spirit  of  the 
things  became  the  object  of  his  representation, 
and  in  that  way,  as  Fromehtin  says,  "No  one 
can  be  so  little  of  a  Hollander." 

But  the  origin  of  that  great  French  school, — 
I  use  the  word  school  as  stating  certain  beliefs 
in  common,  and  not  objects  in  common  —  is 
Dutch;  and  Flers,  Cabat,  Dupr^i,  Rousseau  and 
Corot  all  began  together  a  form  of  opposition  in 
which  their  enemies  felt  the  distrusted  influence 
of  a  foreign  school  which  had  ended  in  a  Rem- 
brandt. They  feared,  not  the  opening  of  nature 
again  —  the  Ecole  des  Beaux-Arts  did  not  look  so 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  65 

far  as  out-of-doors,  but  the  possible  triumph  of  a 
school  of  colour  and  of  light. 

You  will  notice  that  this  school  of  nature  began 
in  the  Museum,  and  that  old  Dutch  pictures  ex- 
plained to  young  men  that  there  was  such  a  thing 
as  a  French  nature  round  about  them.  The  im- 
pression made  by  the  representation  of  that 
nature  concealed  from  the  admirers  of  these  men 
the  manner  of  the  first  steps  taken  towards  this 
discovery. 

Such  a  freedom  of  sight,  ^uch  personal  life, 
may  therefore  come  from  the  admiration  of 
others.  But  often,  when  we  look  at  certain 
works  of  art,  —  and  I  mean  the  successful  ones, 
the  complete  ones,  —  we  may  decide  that,  so  far 
as  we  are  concerned,  what  we  see  is  complete ; 
that  is  to  say  that  the  thing  is  over,  and  that  we 
need  to  take  for  ourselves  some  other  direction,  to 
explore  some  other  less  discovered  country. 

Occasionally  this  feeling  takes  an  ugly  form  in 
ugly  people  who  say,  "I  don't  like  this;  as  for 
me,  I  like  that."  But  I  am  only  talking  of  the 
essence   of    a  meaning,   not   of   our   saying   and 


66  LECTURE  h 

thinking  in  an  ugly  way,  which  is  only  a  way, 
and  not  the  constitution  of  our  thinking. 

We  may  have  such  likings  in  studying  nature 
(that  is  to  say,  as  I  have  defined  nature  —  all  out- 
side of  us)  through  other  artists,  greater  and  more 
complete  than  ourselves;  and  yet  it  often  happens 
that  we  need  more  than  one  man's  view  or  one 
school's  view,  to  be  moved  ourselves  to  action. 
We  need  some  other  admiration  to  fructify  that 
first  one,  as  if  another  element  had  to  be  added ; 
as  if  the  plant  had  flowered,  but  needed  some 
favourable  wind  to  carry  to  it  from  others  what 
would  make  it  fertile. 

I  am  leaving  out  of  consideration  entirely  that 
point  of  which  so  many  young  j^eople  are  very 
proud,  —  the  actual  going  out  of  one's  own  free 
will,  seeing  the  things  of  nature  and  out-of-doors 
for  one's  self,  and  taking  only  from  what  one 
sees  alone,  unaided  by  any  one's  influence,  —  un- 
influenced by  any  memories  that  one  has  ever 
known.  This  side  we  shall  consider  later;  it 
will  furnish  us,  I  think,  with  surprises  greater 
than  any  the  strangest  painter  can  ever  give  us. 


PERSONALITY  AKD  CHOICE  67 

But  meanwhile,  I  may  give  you  a  premonition 
of  what  we  shall  find.  We  can  consider  all 
that  we  record  in  our  brains  as  memories  com- 
posed of  many  other  memories.  We  can,  there- 
fore, see  nothing  without  the  use  of  the  memory 
of  sight  —  or  we  should  not  know  what  it  is. 
Nor,  as  you  know,  could  we  judge  of  the  rela- 
tions of  the  things  we  see,  without  memories  of 
practice  in  observing  relations. 

Even  for  such  a  simple  thing  as  knowing 
that  one  thing  is  further  than  another  we  have 
had  to  make  many  trials  of  the  eye,  and  get 
away  from  the  early  condition  of  the  child  who 
puts  out  his  hand  to  touch  the  moon. 

And  so  for  the  use  of  our  hand  in  painting, 
and  so  for  the  use  of  our  colours.  When  you 
try  to  paint  a  colour  or  a  tone  that  you  see  out- 
of-doors  you  have  to  draw  upon  some  practice 
of  mixing  some  colours  together.  Say  it  is  a 
blue  sky — some  use  of  blue  has  been  made  by 
you ;  and  you  have  gone  instinctively  to  the 
colour-box  to  find  the  place  you  have  in  your 
memory,  the   kind  of  colour  you  have  in  your 


58  LBCTUBB  n 

memory,  the  kind  of  mixture  you  have  in  your 
memory.  Not  once  in  millions  of  times  do  you 
see  a  thing  painted  as  if  the  painter  tried  that 
combination  of  paints  for  the  first  time.  Usually 
he  has  a  recipe ;  he  must  have  one,  even  if  he 
has  to  abandon  it  for  the  moment. 

Nothing  is  more  ironical,  therefore,  to  any  one 
who  has  a  set  palette  of  certain  pigments,  than 
to  suppose  that  he  can  be  absolutely  free-minded 
in  the  way  he  reproduces  things.  It  is  as  if  we 
said  :  We  shall  be  free  in  the  use  of  words,  and 
if  necessary,  put  in  words  of  other  languages 
—  any  which  seem  nearer,  Japanese,  Chinese, 
French ;  and  as  these  cannot  meet  all  cases,  we 
shall  invent  them  as  we  go  along. 

Of  course  we  do  arrange  words,  —  combine 
them,  combine  their  intonations,  their  sounds, 
their  suggestions,  and  the  memories  they  suggest, 
as  well  as  their  distinct  and  limited  meanings. 
And  we  scramble  through  with  these  difficulties. 

As  to  the  painter,  he  does  the  same,  feeling 
that  his  intention  is  the  main  thing,  and  trust- 
ing, without  being  conscious  of  tbat  reliance,  to 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  69 

the  manner  in  which  we  the  lookers-on  help 
to  make  the  illusion.  For  we  make  the  illusion 
ourselves  :  —  The  painting  has  nothing  for  us 
but  what  we  can  co-ordinate  of  our  memories. 
An  Ashantee  negro  or  the  average  picture  dealer 
cannot  see  a  painting  with  the  eye  of  a  Rem- 
brandt or  a  Rousseau,  and  make  as  great  an 
illusion  for  himself. 

When  I  look  at  the  brush-mark  of  a  Jap- 
anese painter,  —  which  is  but  a  sweep  of  India 
ink,  it  may  have  for  me  modelling,  colour,  air, 
texture,  the  sense  of  weather,  of  wet,  heat,  or 
windy  cold  —  a  feeling  of  reticence  or  of  fulness 
of  detail.  Between  his  few  lines  I  shall  feel  the 
water  of  the  rushing  waterfall  or  the  wet  surfaces 
of  the  rice  fields. 

The  black  etched  line  of  Rembrandt  will  give 
me  a  far  spreading  horizon  not  in  the  direction 
of  his  line,  but  running  to  it.  A  few  scratches 
of  his  will  make  the  earth  sink  or  rise,  remain 
solid,  or  be  covered  with  water :  —  no  longer  in 
fact  be  ink  and  paper,  but  light  and  air  and 
shadow  and  varying  form. 


60  LECTURE  n 

But  of  this  further,  when  the  time  comes  to 
consider  how  we  see,  which  I  hope  to  make  you 
think  of  later.  Meanwhile  we  may  be  sure  that 
every-one  carries  out-of-doors  some  memories  of 
the  studio,  and  an  enormous  mass  of  acquired 
habits,  partly  not  his  own.  Such  studies  and 
inquiries  as  we  can  follow  will  reassure  us  that 
there  is  a  general  direction  always  followed,  even 
by  artists  who  are  not  known  to  each  other,  who 
in  their  path  might  be  said  not  even  to  be  within 
hailing  distance.  And  we  can  clear  our  minds, 
and  call  things  by  their  right  names,  and  not 
confuse  main  principles  with  the  various  practices 
or  methods  necessary  to  carry  out  the  principles 
in  each  varying  case. 

No;  we  artists  must  —  whether  we  will  it  or 
not,  whether  we  recognize  it  or  not  —  be  led  by 
our  individual  being.  We  give  our  attention, 
then  our  liking,  to  some  one,  now  caring  for  this 
one,  now  delighting  in  that  one,  and  out  of  the 
practice  of  each  one  often  getting  without  know- 
ing it  the  essential  principles  held  in  each  case 
and  in  common  by  each  artist  we  have  loved 
and  admired  in  turn. 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  61 

And  sometimes,  if  instead  of  looking  at  the 
artist  himself,  i.e.  his  works,  we  listen  too  easily 
to  talk  about  his  work  by  others  than  liimself 
(for  he  may  be  dead),  we  may  be  told  that  certain 
practices  are  principles  —  that  certain  habits  are 
essential  reasons. 

In  addressing  you  confidentially,  I  feel  the 
occasional  necessity  of  coming  to  anecdote  and 
memories,  so  as  to  reinforce  by  actual  single  fact 
what  I  am  saying,  lest  it  should  appear  abstract 
and  inapplicable. 

I  had  rather  not  speak  to  you  of  myself  and 
of  other  painters  I  know  and  have  known.  But 
the  main  value  of  what  I  have  to  say  to  you 
students  and  younger  people  is  that  I  am  older 
and  have  gone  through  many  of  your  experiments 
of  practice,  your  admirations  or  dislikes,  and  your 
trials  of  mind.  They  are  new  for  each  of  us 
singly,  as  they  come  along,  fresh  as  they  were 
when  the  first  man  looked  about  him. 

After  all,  remember  that  what  I  tell  you  is 
the  result  of  life,  whether  in  thought  or  in  action ; 
and  that  I  am  only  able  to  give  principles  and 


62  LECTURE  n 

foundations  for  thinking,  through  having  visited 
certain  regions  of  thought,  through  surprises  that 
have  fallen  upon  me,  and  that  what  confidence 
I  have  to-day  in  talking  to  you  is  hased  on  no 
a  priori  certainty  that  I  had  it  all  before  begin- 
ning. 

And  so  certain  little  experiences  of  myself  and 
others  have  been,  in  a  sort  of  foreshortened  man- 
ner, lessons  to  me  and  helps  to  thought.  What 
has  made  me  break  off  to  say  this  to  you  just 
now  is  the  coming  back  to  my  mind  of  an  inter- 
view with  a  younger  man.  Some  while  ago  a 
former  assistant  of  mine  in  my  work  in  glass 
called  upon  me,  and  in  friendly  talk  —  perhaps 
as  a  sort  of  confession  —  intimated  to  me  that 
he  had  often  been  told  that  I  was  wrong  in  my 
principles,  and  that  he  had  thought  so  himself; 
and  that  yet,  when  he  had  to  judge  of  the  results, 
he  had  found  his  advisers  unable  to  attain  them 
themselves,  and  that  somehow  or  other  my  results 
were  right. 

I  reminded  him  that  I  had  never  talked  of 
principles    to   him   at   all,  —  that    our    relations 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  63 

were  mere  matters  of  practice,  he  doing  what  I 
told  him  to  do,  in  so  far  as  he  could  understand 
what  I  asked  for.  And  I  repeated  to  him  the 
following  story.  Some  years  ago,  while  painting 
Trinity  Church  in  Boston,  I  employed  for  part 
of  the  work  a  firm  of  New  York  decorators.  It 
so  happened  that,  displeased  with  much  that  they 
did,  I  left  large  spaces  bare,  with  no  indication 
of  my  intention,  which  places  I  proposed  deco- 
rating through  men  whom  I  was  training  for 
the  purpose.  One  day  the  foreman  of  the  firm, 
himself  a  decorator,  well  known,  I  suppose,  by 
this  time,  came  to  me  in  anger  and  dismay, 
and  told  me  bluntly  that  I  was  working  against 
every  principle  of  painting.  As  workmen  are 
always  worth  listening  to  when  they  speak  sin- 
cerely of  their  trade  —  and  I  thought  the  man 
a  workman  —  I  expected  to  get  some  important 
information.  But  my  man  merely  stated  that 
the  painting  of  any  room  or  interior  should  be 
begun  from  the  top,  and  go  right  down  to  the 
bottom  without  interruption.  Hoping  for  some 
new   point   in   optics,   I   questioned    further   and 


64  LECTURE  n 

asked  why.  Then  he  told  me,  with  contempt 
as  well  as  anger,  that  otherwise  some  of  the 
lower  work  might  get  spotted  by  a  workman, 
and  would  need  repairing  and  perhaps  cost 
money.  This  story  gives  the  clue  to  a  great 
many  methods  which  are  used  because  they  are 
convenient  and  not  because  they  are  the  best. 
And  thus  I  have  sometimes  relieved  the  minds 
of  conscientious  students  troubled  by  assertions 
of  principles ;  I  have  drawn  their  attention  to  the 
fact  that  there  are  trade  methods  which  are  trans- 
muted into  principles  by  people  whose  interest 
it  is  to  confuse  them,  or  whose  minds  have  been 
attuned  to  the  confusion  at  an  early  stage  of 
development. 

Even  if  this  were  a  proper  place,  I  should 
not  feel  inclined  to  allow  you  to  believe  that 
there  was  only  one  proper  manner  of  carrying 
out  a  work  of  art :  that  getting  canvas  of  a 
certain  thickness  and  of  a  certain  absorbent  or 
non-absorbent  quality,  and  painting  thereon  with 
a  certain  kind  of  brush,  either  a  square  one  or 
one   of  a   different  shape,  and   using   with   that 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  65 

brush  certain  pigments  bought  at  certain  places 
in  the  city,  from  which  certain  colours  are  ex- 
cluded, or  among  which  they  are  included,  and 
dropping  that  paint  on  in  a  certain  way,  con- 
trolled by  the  shape  of  the  brush,  and  the  man- 
ner in  which  the  manufacturer  made  the  canvas, 
is  the  proper  method  of  painting. 

Whatever  I  might  myself  believe,  such  a  teach- 
ing as  I  have  described  would  be  absurd  in  a 
museum.  Can  you  imagine  the  smile  that  would 
disturb  the  faces  of  the  Egyptian  mummies  in 
the  rooms  below  us,  who  may  have  known  the 
sculptors  that  made  the  "Walking  Sheik  El  Beled, 
or  the  sweet  face  of  the  lady  Nefert,  or  the 
terrible  Chafra  who  sits  at  Boulak?  The  meth- 
ods of  to-day  were  unknown  when  these  men 
lived,  and  yet  who  of  to-day  can  hope  to  go  any 
further?  And  what  would  Kembrandt  think, 
and  Veronese,  and  Rubens,  and  Velasquez  ? 
Surely  these  men  painted  as  well  as  you  can 
ever  hope  to  paint,  and  each  one  in  a  different 
method,  and  each  one  admiring  the  others,  won- 
dering at  the  other's  scope  and  the  other's  art. 


66  LECTURE  n 

Understand  that  what  you  have  to  learn  here, 
where  all  things  are  gathered  at  the  risk  of 
every  possible  contradiction,  is  the  size  of  the 
world  and  its  being  greater  than  any  one  per- 
sonal experience. 

The  science  of  to-day,  while  it  establishes  more 
certainly  many  things  which  the  artist  who 
works  in  matters  of  sight  has  stated  from  per- 
sonal certainty,  makes  us  understand  how  wide 
are  the  variations  within  which  these  certainties 
are  apprehended  by  the  artist,  and  explains  to 
us  more  and  more  the  importance  of  his  per- 
sonal equation,  shows  us  what  we  painters  have 
always  felt,  —  through  what  imperfect  means 
and  against  what  enormous  odds  the  soul  of 
the  artist  has  tried  to  express  itself.  As  we 
consider  the  history  of  the  long  struggle  of  the 
artist  at  expressing  his  likings  of  the  outside 
world,  from  him  who  first  scratched  the  outlines 
of  the  reindeer  and  the  mastodon  upon  fragments 
of  bone,  to  Rembrandt  or  Velasquez  who  can  de- 
ceive our  eyes  by  films  of  superimposed  colour, 
we  see   how  accurately   men   have   always   felt, 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  67 

and  how  inaccurately  they  have  seen.  At  the 
same  time,  with  every  inaccuracy  has  been 
blended  some  distinct  proof  of  strong  perception, 
which  has  been  willing  to  accept  certain  deficien- 
cies, that  the  main  purpose  of  observation  might 
be  carried  out  triumphantly.  Each  man  has 
succeeded  in  turn,  through  fitting  his  means  to 
his  capacity,  that  is  to  say,  to  the  sum  of 
memories  accumulated  in  him  by  his  ancestors 
and  himself,  and  by  using  his  very  deficiencies 
to  introduce  us,  as  if  by  human  sympathy,  to 
the  truths  of  impression  that  he  valued  most. 

If  any  one  should  ever  wish  to  give  you  a  fixed 
equation  that  shall  cover  every  problem  of  paint- 
ing, without  taking  any  account  of  your  carrying 
it  otiy  if  any  one  gives  you  a  general  nostrum  to 
be  applied  at  once  by  yourself,  remember  what  a 
hesitating  artist  once  said  to  another  kindly  one, 
willing  to  impart  to  him,  for  his  good,  the  abso- 
lute secret  of  Titian. 

"  It  is  all  very  evident,"  said  the  more  prudent 
painter ;  "  no  doubt  you  have  the  complete  for- 
mula ;  and  you,  in  your  strength,  can  apply  it  and 


68  LECTURE  n 

produce  works  of  art  quite  equal  to  the  formula. 
But  for  me,  I  am  a  weakling,  and  I  should  stag- 
ger under  such  a  heavy  weight  of  certainties.  I 
had  rather  carry  a  burden  more  suited  to  my 
back." 

In  such  a  place,  then,  as  a  museum,  we  may 
well  look  with  awe  at  the  long  succession  of 
efforts  made  by  our  ancestors  in  art,  those  whom 
we  know  and  those  whom  we  do  not  know,  but 
from  whom  we  inherit  in  common.  It  is  to  study 
some  of  these  efforts,  among  which  there  may  be 
some  that  will  avail  you,  that  we  have  come 
together.  We  are  not  anxious,  at  present,  to 
place  any  exact  date  or  sequence  upon  them,  ex- 
cept as  the  one  may  strictly  derive  from  the  other. 
For  our  purposes,  we  may  often  be  anxious,  om  the 
contrary,  to  forget  their  date  and  the  place  where 
they  were  made ;  because  what  is  most  interesting 
to  us  in  the  line  of  our  proposed  inquiry  is  that 
these  artists  of  all  kinds  and  degrees  were  men 
like  ourselves,  and  had  to  work  with  means  not 
dissimilar  to  ours. 

Men,  then,  are   all   important;    the   ways    in 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  69 

which  we  paint  or  shall  paint  are  the  tools  they 
have  used  or  will  use.  It  is  well  that  you  should 
admire  how  well  these  tools  are  adapted  to  their 
use ;  and  if,  moreover,  they  fit  your  hand,  you  do 
well  to  use  them. 

Though  we  do  well  to  tend  towards  an  absolute 
way  of  painting,  there  is  no  such  thing  if  by 
painting  we  mean  the  representation  of  what  can 
be  noticed  or  seen.  But  there  are  wise  ways  and 
less  wise  ways  —  more  generous  ones  —  less  nar- 
row ones  —  more  universal  ones ;  some  more  per- 
sonal, others  more  general.  But  each  of  these  is 
based  again  on  what  the  man  intended.  Of  him 
we  can  judge  as  we  judge  men;  and  strange  to 
say,  it  will  always  be  more  or  less  by  a  moral 
idea,  by  an  appreciation  of  the  way  he  looked 
upon  the  world. 

And  in  the  artist,  have  you  ever  noticed  how 
simple  it  is  to  disengage  the  man?  When  once 
the  artist  has  summed  up  in  himself  the  mem- 
ories of  his  apprenticeship,  the  acquired  memories 
of  others,  and  his  own,  —  derived  from  them  per- 
haps, but  at  any  rate  added  to  them,  —  you  can  try 


70  LECTURE  II 

with  him  the  following  experiment.  Take  him  to 
ten  different  places ;  set  him  before  ten  different 
scenes;  ask  him  to  copy  what  he  sees  before 
him.  I  say  to  copy,  so  as  to  make  our  task  of 
finding  him  out  more  easy.  All  of  these  so-called 
copies,  which  are  really  representations,  will  be 
stamped  in  some  peculiar  way,  more  or  less  inter- 
esting, according  to  the  value  of  our  artist.  And 
you  will  recognize  at  once  that  they  are  really 
ten  copies  of  his  manner  of  looking  at  the  thing 
that  he  copies. 

Suppose  again,  that  you  could  persuade  ten 
different  artists  —  I  am  speaking  of  craftsmen, 
that  is  to  say,  of  people  who  have  already  the  use 
of  the  tools  of  their  trade  —  ask,  persuade  these 
ten  men  to  copy,  as  I  have  called  it,  the  same 
subject  in  nature,  the  same  landscape ;  and  you 
will  have  ten  different  landscapes,  in  that  you 
would  be  able  to  pick  out  each  one  for  the  way  it 
was  done.  In  short,  any  person  who  knew  any- 
thing about  it  would  recognize,  as  it  were,  ten 
different  landscapes.^ 

1 R.  TOpf er. 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  71 

Now  we  have  evidently  brought  the  question 
to  a  case  so  simple,  to  a  trial  so  absolute,  that 
anybody  can  understand  it.  And  this  trial,  or  a 
similar  trial,  is  made  over  and  over  again,  when- 
ever two  or  three  artists  of  any  character  have 
gone  out  sketching  together.  I  remember  myself, 
years  ago,  sketching  with  two  well-known  men, 
artists  who  were  great  friends,  great  cronies,  ask- 
ing each  other  all  the  time,  how  to  do  this  and 
how  to  do  that;  but  absolutely  different  in  the 
texture  of  their  minds  and  in  the  result  that  they 
wished  to  obtain,  so  far  as  the  pictures  and  draw- 
ings by  which  they  were  well  known  to  the  public 
were  concerned. 

What  we  made,  or  rather,  I  should  say,  what 
we  wished  to  note,  was  merely  a  memorandum  of 
a  passing  effect  upon  the  hills  that  lay  before  us. 
We  had  no  idea  of  expressing  ourselves,  or  of 
studying  in  any  way  the  subject  for  any  future 
use.  We  merely  had  the  intention  to  note  this 
affair  rapidly,  and  we  had  all  used  the  same  words 
to  express  to  each  other  what  we  liked  in  it. 
There  were  big  clouds  rolling  over  hills,  sky  clear- 


72  LECTURE  n 

ing  above,  dots  of  trees  and  water  and  meadow- 
land  below,  and  the  ground  fell  away  suddenly 
before  us.  Well,  our  three  sketches  were,  in  the 
first  place,  different  in  shape ;  either  from  our 
physical  differences,  or  from  a  habit  of  drawing 
certain  shapes  of  a  picture,  which  itself  usually 
indicates  —  as  you  know,  or  ought  to  know  — 
whether  we  are  looking  far  or  near.  Two  were 
oblong,  but  of  different  proportions;  one  was 
more  nearly  a  square  ;  the  distance  taken  in  to  the 
right  and  left  was  smaller  in  the  latter  case,  and 
on  the  contrary,  the  height  up  and  down  —  that 
is  to  say  the  portion  of  land  beneath  and  the  por- 
tion of  sky  above  —  was  greater.  In  each  picture 
the  distance  bore  a  different  relation  to  the  fore- 
ground. In  each  picture  the  clouds  were  treated 
with  different  precision  and  different  attention. 
In  one  picture  the  open  sky  above  was  the  main 
intention  of  the  picture.  In  two  pictures  the 
upper  sky  was  of  no  consequence  —  it  was  the 
clouds  and  the  mountains  that  were  insisted  upon. 
The  drawing  was  the  same,  that  is  to  say,  the 
general  make  of  things ;  but  each  man  had  invol- 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  73 

untarily  looked  upon  what  was  most  interesting  to 
him  in  the  whole  sight ;  and  though  the  whole 
sight  was  what  he  meant  to  represent,  he  had  un- 
consciously preferred  a  beauty  or  an  interest  of 
things  different  from  what  his  neighbor  liked. 

The  colour  of  each  painting  was  different  —  the 
vivacity  of  colour  and  tone,  the  distinctness  of  each 
part  in  relation  to  the  whole ;  and  each  picture 
would  have  been  recognized  anywhere  as  a  speci- 
men of  work  by  each  one  of  us,  characteristic  of 
our  names.  And  we  spent  on  the  whole  affair 
perhaps  twenty  minutes. 

I  wish  you  to  understand,  again,  that  we  each 
thought  and  felt  as  if  we  had  been  photographing 
the  matter  before  us.  We  had  not  the  first  desire 
of  expressing  ourselves,  and  I  think  would  have 
been  very  much  worried  had  we  not  felt  that  each 
one  was  true  to  nature.  And  we  were  each  one 
true  to  nature. 

Of  course  there  is  no  absolute  nature ;  as  with 

each  slight  shifting  of  the  eye,  involuntarily  we 

focus  more  or  less  distinctly  some  part  to  the  prej- 

.  udice  of  others.     And  not  only  would  this  result 


74  LECTUBE  n 

have  been  the  same  if  we  had  gone  on  painting, 
but  had  we  made  a  drawing  —  had  we  made  a 
careful  representation,  or  a  rapid  note  of  what  we 
saw  by  lines  (that  is  to  say,  by  an  abstraction  of 
the  edges  of  the  surfaces  that  we  saw),  any  one 
could  have  told  the  names  of  the  men  who  had 
done  it. 

All  this  sort  of  thing  is  perfectly  well  known, 
but  on  that  very  account  you  will  have  passed 
over  the  importance  of  its  meaning.  You  will 
see  again  what  I  have  been  telling  you,  last  week 
and  to-day,  that  the  man  is  the  main  question, 
and  that  there  can  be  no  absolute  view  of  nature. 
I  do  not  know  how  often  you  may  be  talked  to 
about  theories  of  art,  and  how  much  you  care 
for  the  same  at  the  present  moment ;  but  at 
some  moment  or  other  you  will  have  brought 
before  you  that  most  important  conflict  of  realism 
and  its  opposite.  I  don't  say  idealism,  because  I 
don't  so  distinctly  know  what  is  meant  by  it; 
while  realism  has  been  in  the  market  now  for 
quite  a  time,  and  has  served  as  a  beautiful  play- 
ground for  various  intellects.     What  I  want  you 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  VS 

to  notice  is  that  though  in  abstraction  there  must 
be  such  a  thing  —  I  should  be  the  last  to  gainsay 
it  —  yet,  in  these  realities  with  which  we  are 
concerned,  realism  is  a  very  evasive  distinction. 
If  the  experiments  that  I  spoke  of  —  if  experi- 
ences such  as  I  have  just  related  about  myself 
and  others  bring  out  the  result  that  you  have 
seen,  there  is  for  you  practically  no  such  thing 
as  realism. 

You  need  not,  therefore,  be  afraid  of  the  word ; 
you  need  not  be  afraid  of  indulging  the  illusion 
that  you  are  rendering  the  real  reality  of  the 
things  that  you  look  at  —  that  you  are  copying, 
that  you  are  transcribing.  If  you  ever  know 
how  to  paint  somewhat  well,  and  pass  beyond 
the  position  of  the  student  who  has  not  yet 
learned  to  use  his  hands  as  an  expression  of 
the  memories  of  his  brain,  you  will  always  give 
to  nature,  that  is  to  say,  what  is  outside  of  you, 
the  character  of  the  lens  through  which  you  see 
it  —  which  is  yourself. 

Have  no  fear,  therefore,  as  I  say ;  perhaps  of 
all  moments  for  indulgence  in  the  belief  of  abso- 


76  LECTUHE  n 

lute  representation  there  is  none  better  than  our 
first  beginnings. 

We  might  perhaps  take  an  example  of  the 
manner  in  which  the  truth  of  a  scene  in  nature 
affects  an  artist,  and  see  if  from  this  example 
we  might  not  deduce  a  scheme  of  teaching,  per- 
haps not  very  deep,  perhaps  limited  at  once  in 
its  applications,  but  quite  comprehensible  in  all 
its  parts  as  one  went  along.  By  the  use  of  exam- 
ples, and  by  appealing  to  your  own  experience, 
limited  as  it  may  be,  by  taking  the  facts  one  by 
one,  we  might,  if  I  may  so  say,  get  our  theory 
along  with  our  facts.  There  is  a  passage  in 
Fromentin's  book  on  the  Algerian  Sahel  in  which 
are  developed  various  ways  of  looking  at  a  given 
scene,  so  that  we  can  see  the  picture  of  it  become 
one  thing  or  another,  according  to  the  character 
or  the  intentions  of  the  artist. 

I  shall  begin  by  quoting  a  part  of  what  he 
says;  and  I  shall  then  trust  to  giving  you  suffi- 
ciently the  analogies  that  he  makes,  without 
confining  myself  to  a  quotation,  which  perhaps 
in  this  case  would  be   too  beautiful  to  modify, 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  77 

and  would  not  allow  me  to  make  the  small 
divisions  which  should  cause  it  to  fit  more 
completely  into  our  argument. 

This  is  the  way  in  which  he  comes  to  make 
this  analysis :  he  was  trying  to  show  his  friend 
the  geologist,  and  to  explain  to  him  at  length, 
how  different  painters  might  look  at  the  scene 
they  had  now  before  them.     He  begins : 

"  We  were  at  that  moment  in  the  market- 
place of  Blidah.  A  number  of  children  were 
playing  ball  in  a  way  which  is  cosmopolitan  — 
which  is  known  in  the  "West  as  well  as  in  the 
East.  A  ball  or  a  stick,  no  matter  what  it  is 
like,  is  thrown  rapidly  and  far  away.  Each 
player  has  a  stick,  and  he  who  gets  there  first 
strikes  the  ball  and  drives  it  again.  The  players 
were  young  children  from  eight  to  twelve  years 
old,  with  agreeable  faces  and  delicate  bodies,  as 
have  most  little  Moors ;  with  clear-cut  features, 
large  and  handsome  eyes,  and  skin  as  pure  as 
that  of  women.  Their  arms  were  naked,  and 
their  delicate  necks  shone  above  their  open 
waistcoats.     Their  floating  trousers  were  pulled 


78  LECTURE  n 

up  above  the  knee,  so  as  to  let  them  run  easily, 
and  little  red  chachia,  like  the  skull-caps  of  choir- 
boys, just  covered  the  top  of  the  little  bald 
heads.  Each  time  that  the  ball  was  struck  and 
started,  all  together  ran  in  its  pursuit,  side  by 
side,  in  a  serried  troop,  like  so  many  gazelles. 
They  ran  with  many  gestures,  losing  their  head- 
dresses, losing  their  belts,  flying  directly  to  the 
goal,  and  appearing  not  to  touch  the  earth ;  for 
all  that  one  could  see  of  the  light  step  of  the 
runners  was  their  naked  heels  moving  in  a  wave 
of  dust;  and  this  aerial  cloud  seemed  to  hasten 
their  running  and  to  bear  them  onward. 

"  It  was  two  o'clock ;  the  market  was  just  over, 
and  the  place  was  entirely  deserted,  —  a  square 
of  houses,  low  and  without  roofs;  one  or  two 
cypresses  pointing  above  the  terraces;  the  moun- 
tain beyond,  whose  serrate  horizon  divided  the 
sky  by  more  than  half ;  that  sky  empty ;  a  great 
stretch  of  level  ground,  —  that  was  the  landscape. 
The  houses  were  of  a  dead  white,  slightly  dis- 
coloured by  blistering ;  the  cypresses  were  black ; 
the  mountain  was  frankly  green;    the  sky  of  a 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  79 

vivid  blue,  and  the  earth  dust-colour  —  that  is  to 
say,  nearly  lilac.  A  single  shadow  in  the  middle 
of  the  bright  light  was  drawn  on  that  side  of  the 
place  to  which  the  sun  inclined  ;  and  this  shadow, 
inundated  by  reflections  from  the  sky,  could  have 
been,  in  a  way,  expressed  by  blue." 

"Do  you  see,"  said  Fromentin  to  his  friend, 
"this  place  and  these  children?  The  scene  is 
a  familiar  one,  quite  in  the  conditions  of  what 
we  call  genre.  The  frame  of  the  scene,  that 
is  to  say,  the  place  where  it  occurs,  has  this 
double  advantage  of  accompanying  it  in  a  very 
simple  way  and  still  a  very  local  one.  The 
example  is  as  good  as  any  other,  and  the  Orient, 
which  I  am  trying  to  represent,  can  be  said 
to  be  contained  within  this  narrow  frame." 

Then  he  goes  on  and  asks  naturally,  just 
as  I  would  ask  myself  in  painting,  not  by  words, 
but  in  intention  —  just  as  I  would  ask  you  in 
words,  if  I  were  giving  you  a  lesson,  "  What 
do  we  see  and  how  shall  we  look  at  this  subject 
before  us?  Are  these  children  who  are  playing 
in   the   sunlight,  or  is  it  a  place  in  the  sunlight 


80  LECTURE   II 

in  which  children  are  playing  ? "  At  once,  as 
you  will  see,  if  you  call  to  mind  what  Fromentin 
has  been  describing  —  the  scene  before  him  and 
his  friend  could  be  looked  at  from  two  very 
different  points  of  view.  In  the  first  case,  if 
we  suppose  that  we  are  looking  at  children 
playing  in  the  sun,  we  have  a  figure  painting, 
a  picture  of  figures  in  which  the  landscape  is 
accessory.  In  the  second  case,  if  this  be  a 
place  in  the  sun  in  which  children  are  playing, 
then  we  are  looking  at  a  landscape  where  the 
human  figure  is  subordinated  —  put  into  a  back- 
ground of  intention.  Now  then,  the  landscap- 
ist  will  see  there,  in  one  case,  a  landscape ; 
the  figure-painter,  in  the  other  case,  what  he 
calls  a  subject.  And  in  these  divisions  behold 
how  many  directions  open!  Will  the  landscape 
painter  see  it  as  a  scene  of  colour  and  of  values  ? 
Will  he  look  rather  upon  the  firm  lines  and 
the  solitariness  of  this  empty  place  abandoned  to 
the  noonday  sun  ?  Where  will  he  take  —  at 
what  point  of  their  career  will  he  take  the  little 
figures  which   are   scattered  over  it?    Are   they 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  8" 

leaving  it  ?  Are  they  entering  it  ?  Do  they  fill 
the  centre?  Are  they  gathered  in  bunches  or 
divided  into  spots  of  colour  and  moving  shape  ? 
Is  it  their  mass  casting  shadows,  or  the  manner 
in  which  the  reflection  of  the  light  breaks  up  all 
other  details,  that  most  affects  him  ?  Will  they 
repeat,  in  some  way  or  other,  the  lights  and  shad- 
ows of  the  entire  scene,  or  will  the  scene  with  the 
greens  and  blues  be  modified  by  the  little  spots 
and  accents  within  this  frame  of  landscape  ? 
Shall  he  fix  his  eye  on  that  solitary  cypress  and 
its  dark  shadow  lying  upon  the  blazing  earth, 
thereby  making,  as  you  have  seen  in  Fortuny's 
sketches,  of  the  blue  sky  above,  a  half-dulled  cur- 
tain of  blue  light  ?  On  the  contrary,  shall  that 
blue  light  on  which  he  fixes  not  only  the  focus  of 
his  eye  but  the  purpose  of  his  attention  —  shall 
that  blue  light  be  the  subject,  and  shall  he  follow 
its  gradations  and  its  variations  through  the 
landscape  itself,  through  the  harsh  brightness 
of  the  houses  and  their  accidental  shadows, 
and  finally  detect  its  tones  even  in  the  many 
colours    of    the    children's    garments    and    the 


82  LECTURE  n 

brightest  spots  of  vermilion  of  their  little  mov- 
ing caps? 

If  he  is  fond  of  the  angles  and  sudden  contrasts 
of  line  presented  by  the  buildings  before  him,  will 
he  look  upon  them  as  his  theme ;  upon  the  moun- 
tains and  the  sky  as  something  to  reinforce  them 
and  make  them  harsher  and  firmer;  and  find  in 
the  little  figures  of  the  children  merely  something 
to  keep  these  lines  steadier  and  more  immovable, 
by  a  suggestion  of  constant  change  elsewhere  ? 

I  have  only  mentioned  a  few  of  the  many  possi- 
bilities that  we  can  derive  from  this  first  state- 
ment and  division  of  the  subject  by  Fromentin. 
Now  let  us  suppose  a  figure  painter,  to  whom  the 
landscape  will  be  subordinate  in  greater  or  less 
degree.  Will  he  use  that  landscape  as  a  faint 
tapestry  behind  his  figures?  Will  he  depend 
upon  it,  on  the  contrary,  to  accentuate  by  strong 
lights,  and  by  occasional  strong  shadows,  the 
grouping  of  his  children?  Will  he  care  for  the 
mass  of  their  gestures  or  for  their  individual  suc- 
cession ?  Will  he  make  a  point  of  their  gestures 
and   their  relation   one  to  the  other  ?    Will  he 


PERSONALITY  AND  CHOICE  83 

follow  out  their  characters,  the  characters  of  their 
faces,  the  amusing  variety  of  their  costumes? 
Will  he  make  a  symphony  of  the  arrangement  of 
their  colours  ?  Will  he  make  a  symphony  of  the 
lights  they  scatter,  or  a  pattern  of  the  shadows 
they  cast,  which  divide  or  which  connect  them  ? 

Now  from  how  far  will  he  see  them  ?  "  For," 
says  Fromentin,  "  according  to  whether  they  are 
placed  near  or  far,  these  children  will  become  all 
or  will  be  nothing.  And  if  you  suppose  them 
near  enough  to  the  painter,  so  that  the  portrait  of 
each  one  has  a  dominant  interest,  then  a  singular 
change  will  appear,  and  in  this  very  simple  picture 
all  the  landscape  will  disappear  at  once;  only 
something  like  earth  struck  by  light,  from  which 
even  the  indication  of  Oriental  scenery  can  be 
suppressed,  will  remain." 

"  Therefore,"  he  goes  on,  "  nothing  will  remain 
visible  and  formulated  but  a  group,  important 
especially  by  its  human  significance,  composed  of 
children  animated  by  rapid  movement  and  pas- 
sionate joy,  and  presented  to  us  so  as  to  draw 
attention  to  the  expression  of  gesture  with  some, 


84  LECTURE  n 

and  to  the  play  of  the  faces  with  others.  From 
elimination  to  elimination  we  shall  arrive  at  the 
reducing  of  the  frame,  then  at  its  suppression ; 
then  at  increasing  the  group  in  importance,  and 
then  at  simplifying  it.  The  costume  itself  be- 
comes a  secondary  accident,  in  a  subject  whose 
interest  is  centred  so  completely  in  human  forms 
and  expressions." 

And  then  he  adds  a  most  important  observa- 
tion :  "  We  can  suppress  the  sun  and  the  excessive 
light,  —  a  double  obstacle  which  has  rarely  before 
to-day  preoccupied  any  mind  when  the  interest 
was  first  that  of  painting  human  beings." 

"  What  then  becomes  of  the  place  in  which  we 
saw  the  scene,  —  this  white  place,  these  green 
cypresses,  this  white  sun  of  the  meridian  hours? 
What  becomes  of  all  these  outside  matters  so  local 
and  significant;  essential  if  we  wish  to  localize 
the  scene ;  useless,  on  the  contrary,  if  we  wish  to 
generalize  it?" 

"Thus  we  touch  abstractions,  and  without  in- 
tending it,  by  the  simple  fact  of  a  severer  and 
more  concentric  point  of  view,  we  leave  outside 


PERSONALITT  AND  CHOICE  85 

nature  to  enter  into  the  combinations  of  the 
studio.  We  abandon  thereby  relative  truth  for 
an  order  of  larger  truth,  less  precise  and  therefore 
more  absolute,  since  it  is  less  local." 

"For  us,  at  this  instant,  this  little  place  of 
Blidah,  solitary,  violently  lit  by  the  full  light  of  a 
beautiful  summer  day,  these  red  jackets  and  white 
trousers,  these  pretty  children,  seem  strange  to 
us ;  and  that  especially  is  what  pleases  us  at  this 
moment ;  this  heat,  this  noise,  the  diversity  of  the 
scene,  changing  at  every  moment,  —  all  this  com- 
poses a  unity  of  multiple  impressions,  and  charms 
us,  and  especially  so  because  we  see  in  it  the 
individual  character  of  a  picture  of  the  East." 

"There  are,  on  the  contrary,  painters,  and  I 
know  them,  who  would  only  take  from  this  what 
is  necessary,  esteeming  that  what  is  most  interest- 
ing in  these  children  is  not  to  be  little  children  of 
Blidah,  but  to  be  children;  and  these  certainly 
would  be  in  the  right." 

Let  us  consider  now  that  for  all  these  varieties 
of  manners  of  looking  at  this  same  subject  there 
must  be  a  corresponding  system  of  painting :  that 


86  LECTURE  n 

the  vibration  of  light,  the  refraction  from  the 
brilliant  surfaces  described  in  the  Oriental  scene 
just  sketched,  will  demand  a  placing  together  of 
high-keyed  colours  in  painting,  in  contradiction  of 
another  manner  that  might  accentuate,  by  clear- 
ness and  little  modulation,  the  sharp  and  distinct 
features  of  the  real  picture  in  nature.  And  which 
side  of  nature  shall  we  choose ;  the  look  of  great 
breadth  and  simplicity  and  absorption  of  details, 
or,  on  the  contrary,  that  appearance  of  absolute 
finish  and  particularity  in  multitudinousness  which 
almost  makes  us  hopeless  of  any  due  record  ? 

The  sparkle  obtained  by  Fortuny  through  con- 
stant oppositions ;  the  blending  of  colour  and  tone 
by  Delacroix,  would  again  belong  to  some  variety 
of  manner  of  looking  at  the  subject  —  in  the  one 
the  search  for  smaller  things,  in  the  latter  for 
greater  ones.  And  so  on,  for  varieties  as  many 
as  you  can  remember  painters,  —  and  I  abstain 
from  even  thinking  of  draughtsmen.  And  for 
each  new  method  of  painting,  some  still  more 
physical,  more  manual  distinctions ;  thickness  or 
lightness  of  colour,  softening  and  blending  of  paint, 


PERSONALITY  ANB  CHOICE  S*? 

or  bringing  its  edges  harshly  together;  surfaces 
with  many  underneaths,  made  of  many  veilings ; 
or  with  coverings  of  colour,  placed  as  nearly  as 
possible  by  the  first  touch  of  the  brush. 

Even  the  brush  would  vary ;  and  this  mention 
of  the  type  of  our  art  brings  his  lengthy  statement 
of  differences  to  an  end. 

And  yet  each  man  would  have  been  true  to  that 
nature  which  we  see,  and  which  for  us  painters 
only  assumes  existence  in  ourselves, — is  merely 
the  recall  of  innumerable  memories  of  sight. 


LECTURE  III 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION 


SYNOPSIS  OF  LECTURE  m 

The  illusion  suggested  by  the  artist's  work  is  directed  by  him  but 
mostly  made  by  us.  —  Selection  of  one  factor  in  the  scene  to  the 
exclusion  of  others.  —  Drawing  a  natural  convention,  a  manner  of 
synthesis  and  suggestion  by  lines  that  imply  things.  —  Illusions  of 
black  and  white.  —  Hieroglyphics  of  representation  by  drawing,  a 
bridge  over  which  we  pass  to  receive  the  desired  impression.  — What 
is  there  is  what  we  intend  to  see. — The  religious  painter:  Michael 
Angelo's  view. 


LECTURE  III 

SUGGESTION   AND   INTENTION 

In  our  last  lecture  we  considered  at  some  length 
how  the  artist  beholds  the  intentions  of  his  mind 
reflected  in  the  face  of  nature ;  and  we  took  one 
single  example,  which  we  supposed  had  really 
happened,  of  two  travellers  —  one  of  them  a 
painter — looking  at  a  certain  scene  in  a  foreign 
country,  and  we  considered  from  how  many  dif- 
ferent mental  points  of  view  they  could  have  seen 
that  landscape.  We  passed  on  to  various  other 
sights  enclosed  within  that  same  scene,  which 
apparently  had  not  at  that  time  appeared  to  the 
mind  of  the  man  who  had  first  recorded  it ;  and 
in  the  lightest  manner  we  considered  a  few  of 
these  many  facets  of  a  described  fact. 

I  believe  that  I  implied  that  the  possible  varia- 
tions would  be  endless,  depending  on  the  combi- 

91 


92  LECTURE  in 

nation  of  the  desires  of  the  artist  with  certain 
sights  out  of  the  multitude  of  things  seen ;  and 
that  these  two  great  divisions,  each  one  compris- 
ing innumerable  variations,  would  be  modified 
again  by  unconscious  desires,  the  result  of  heredi- 
tary memories  or  memories  of  training.  For  each 
variation  there  ought  to  be  some  special  transla- 
tion by  the  hand,  to  which  variation  by  the  hand 
ought  to  answer  some  modification  in  the  use  of 
materials.  For  it  would  be  absurd  to  think  that 
our  practice  should  be  the  rule  to  determine  our 
intentions.  And  I  beg  you  to  remember  —  you 
who  are  students  —  to  remember  to  distinguish  in 
your  mind  principles  which  are  taught  you  from 
practice  which  is  recommended.  But  our  struct- 
ure is  so  complicated,  and  in  our  art  the  relation 
of  the  mind  to  the  matter  of  the  body  and  to  the 
matter  which  the  body  acts  upon,  is  so  subtle,  and 
varies  so  much  through  the  indeterminable  value 
of  personality,  that  we  are  everywhere  met  by 
what  might  at  first  appear  contradictions.  Some 
of  these  may  be  insoluble;  for  many,  as  we  go 
along,  we   shall   find,    I   believe,   quite   adequate 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  93 

explanations  in  the  past,  in  the  acquired  mem- 
ories of  the  artist. 

The  very  manner  in  which  my  mind  travels 
away  from  the  direct  line  of  my  general  intention 
of  speaking  to  you,  warns  me  of  the  impossibility 
of  an  adequate,  or  even  a  plausible  consideration  of 
the  details  involved  in  the  choice  that  we  artists 
make  when  we  determine  or  are  compelled  with- 
out self-consciousness  to  see  a  scene  in  some  given 
manner.  But  with  a  possible  example  of  contra- 
diction, I  may  continue  by  a  return  to  the  more 
direct  line  of  observation. 

You  will  remember  that  I  have  only  spoken  of 
an  entire  scene  ;  I  have  not  supposed  the  selection 
of  any  one  factor  in  the  scene,  to  the  absolute 
exclusion  of  all  others.  The  art  of  painting  as  it 
has  become  —  as  it  may  perhaps  have  been  in 
works  of  the  past,  lost  to  us  in  everything  but 
name  —  is  a  manner  of  representing  the  entire 
thing  seen  as  it  is  translated  to  us,  to  our  working 
mind,  by  colour  and  light. 

I  am  only  speaking  of  painting  as  we  painters 
think  of  it.     We  go  so  far  as  to  arrange,  as  to 


94  LECTURE  m 

condense,  as  to  simplify,  as  to  see,  under  different 
angles,  from  different  points  of  perspective ;  but 
as  painters,  properly  so,  strictly  so,  we  consider 
ourselves  as  attempting  to  embody  all  that  we 
see.  This  strict  division,  which  is  of  the  most 
absolute  importance  in  thinking  correctly  upon 
the  subject,  we  shall  keep  to  and  consider  many 
times  in  the  course  of  these  talks,  and  at  all  times 
in  the  direct,  practical  teaching  that  I  give  you. 

When  I  first  thought  of  an  exception  to  the 
manner  in  which  the  artist  makes  his  material 
plastic,  and  in  an  exception  was  reminded  how 
his  material  turns  against  him,  I  was  thinking  of 
that  line  which  divides  painting  properly  from 
other  methods  of  representation.  This  is  the 
memory  that  awoke  in  my  mind  as  I  thought  of 
what  we  call  drawing.  Three  years  ago  this 
month  I  was  on  a  little  island  in  the  middle  of 
the  Pacific,  and  I  sat  through  the  long  afternoon, 
with  a  little  savage  maiden  dressed  in  flowers  and 
leaves,  and  watched  the  play  of  her  still  younger 
brothers  and  sisters.  They  amused  themselves 
by  drawing,  in  the  wet  sand  of  the  beach  before 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  95 

US,  with  their  fingers,  or  with  bits  of  broken  cane 
or  palm,  the  outlines  of  well-known  fish  and 
birds ;  somewhat  proud  of  their  skill,  and  anxious 
that  the  stranger  should  recognize  it.  The  island 
dove,  the  parrot-fish,  the  mullet  and  the  shark, 
were  given  by  a  few  lines  of  remarkable  char- 
acter. I  marvelled  at  the  fact  that  the  savage  — 
the  beginner  in  thinking  —  was  representing  these 
things  chosen  out  by  him,  in  the  most  abstract 
conceivable  form.  The  savage  child  began  artis- 
tic life  by  summing  up  his  acquaintance  of  sight 
concerning  these  creatures  into  three  or  four 
conventional  lines  —  I  say  conventional,  meaning 
thereby  not  a  single  real  line,  but  a  line  so  com- 
prehensive as  to  include  others,  the  detection  of 
which  others  had  given  him  this  one  that  he  had 
made.  I  might  also  use  the  word  conventional 
because,  had  I  not  seen  these  animals,  I  might 
]iot  have  recognized  them  as  represented  by  so 
few  characteristics. 

Of  course,  like  yourselves,  I  knew  what  draw- 
ing is,  and  I  had  a  clear  idea  of  it  not  different 
from  what  I  have  to-day;    but  the  little  lesson 


96  LECTURE  m 

given  to  me  in  this  way,  by  the  small  savage, 
brought  to  my  mind  the  fact  that  he  had  begun 
first  by  making  a  complete  synthesis  of  certain 
points  that  interested  him,  and  that  he  had 
assumed  to  himself  and  to  others  that  this  syn- 
thesis—  which  was  not  a  copy  of  nature  —  this 
arrangement  and  co-ordination  of  certain  facts  of 
sight,  would  be  understood  by  others  and  repre- 
sent the  thing  seen. 

I  need  not  say,  perhaps,  that  I  never  supposed 
that  my  individual  savage  had  any  conception  of 
the  mechanism  of  his  thought,  or  would  even  be 
capable  of  making  any  analysis  of  it;  but  that 
we  can  do. 

Now  for  the  exception,  that  I  may  get  rid  of  it. 
When,  in  compliment  of  these  children's  skill,  I 
gave  them  my  notebook  of  smooth  paper  and 
easy-going  pencil,  to  trace  again  these  same  forms 
in  the  same  way,  the  lines  they  traced  were  no 
longer  so  expressive ;  their  hands  seemed  to  be 
checked  by  difficulties.  Apparently  the  opposi- 
tion given  or  made  by  the  material  of  the  sand  — 
its  friction  against  a  motion  of  the  hand,  helped 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  97 

to  determine  security  and  certainty  of  direction 
of  the  lines  they  had  traced.  As,  in  another  way, 
the  Japanese  child  who  draws  a  shape  beautifully 
with  a  brush,  has  this  rendering  altered  into 
dryness  and  apparent  irresolution  when  he  uses  a 
lead  pencil  —  an  unaccustomed  implement.  Here 
again  is  the  artist  dictated  to  by  his  technique. 

As  I  have  said,  this  is  a  little  exception  —  a 
little  contradiction,  which  I  think  can  be  easily 
explained  when  we  ascertain  or  consider  later 
the  involuntary  element  in  the  action  of  the 
hand. 

What  is  astonishing  is  that  the  symbolical 
character  of  an  outline  drawing,  —  the  apparent 
necessity  for  a  great  effort  towards  condensation 
that  it  seems  to  require,  its  being  in  reality  the 
representation  of  nature  which  is  furthest  re- 
moved from  our  actual  sight, — that  this  syn- 
thesis should  not  belong  exclusively  to  late 
forms  of  art,  to  degrees  of  culture  when  taste 
has  been  refined  to  the  point  of  appreciating 
the  abstract  delicacy  of  such  a  mode  of  repre- 
sentation.    On  the   contrary,  you   see,  it   is  the 


98  LECTURE  III 

mode  of  art  of  the  savage ;  it  is  the  mode  of 
art  that  children  understand  and  first  care  for. 
Conventional  art,  which  one  would  think  ought 
to  repel  them,  is,  on  the  contrary,  the  most 
suggestive  and  the  most  delightful.  It  must 
then  be  that  in  a  narrower  way,  the  entire 
mind  of  the  child  or  the  savage  goes  into  the 
object  to  be  represented ;  and  that  at  once 
the  main  power  which  we  have  of  accepting 
the  illusions  created  by  ourselves  or  others,  is  the 
means  trusted  to  by  man  in  his  first  attempts. 

It  is  evident  that  to  fill  in  the  empty  spaces 
of  such  representations,  our  imagination  is  drawn 
upon,  and  thus  to  a  certain  extent  it  is  our 
imagination  that  gives  to  this  naked  space,  sep- 
arated from  the  rest  of  space  by  a  more  or  less 
continuous  mark,  those  details  that  are  wanting 
both  in  colour  and  in  modelling. 

You  may  remember  how  Lionardo  recommends 
to  the  student  to  look  for  help  in  composition  to 
the  spottings  and  veinings  of  marble,  the  breaks 
and  disintegration  of  old  walls.  Therein  are  to 
be  found  the  form  of  landscapes,  of   mountains, 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  99 

and  of  buildings,  and  "whatever  you  are  seeking 
to  find." 

I  have  not  the  passage  at  hand,  and  I  cannot 
remember  the  quaint  details  of  its  language. 
And  it  is  as  he  says;  you  have  probably  dis- 
covered these  images  yourselves,  as  you  have 
seen  dissolving  views  in  the  glow  of  the  coals; 
and  you  have  also,  in  looking  at  the  glittering 
points  of  the  stars  of  heaven,  joined  them  to- 
gether by  lines  which  make  traceable  figures ; 
you  have  gathered  the  constellations  in  the  net 
of  a  geometry. 

These  arrangements,  which  are  the  seeking  in 
the  sky  for  what  the  artist  calls  the  lines  of 
composition,  in  his  little  records  of  pictures  — 
these  triangles,  these  squares  —  you  have  really 
seen  them.  You,  as  it  were,  see  the  object 
within  an  interior  sight,  and  other  things  that 
could  be  seen  are  dropped  away  by  your  will. 

Thus,  through  the  crossing  of  many  drawings 
and  tracings,  one  upon  the  other,  we  can  choose 
tlie  one  we  like.  We  distinguish  and  see  noth- 
ing but  the  lines   of   writing   that  we   are   look- 


100  LECTUKE  in 

ing  for,  in  those  crossed  letters  which  in  former 
days  we  received  so  frequently.  If  the  words 
are  very  important  to  ns,  we  see  none  but  those, 
and  not  the  ones  that  cross  them,  however  dis- 
tinctly these  may  all  be  traced.  That  is  to  say, 
that  voluntarily  and  by  effort  we  strengthen 
the  sensation  we  wish  to  have,  and  weaken  the 
one  that  we  do  not  care  for.  And  so  in  looking 
for  a  set  of  composition  lines,  like  those  that 
make  the  constellation  of  the  Dipper  (Great 
Bear),  I  end  by  knowing  them  as  if  they  had 
an  objective  existence  outside  of  me.  I  may 
seek  out,  in  the  coloured  ornamentation  of  a  tap- 
estry, all  the  curves  and  leafage  which  are  of  a 
certain  colour.  They  seem  to  me  the  pattern, 
and  the  remainder  a  ground  upon  which  they 
appear,  and   I   may  reverse   them  and   so   forth. 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  101 

Thus,  if  on  a  white  surface  I  trace  two  concentric 
circles,  I  can  look  upon  the  image  as  representing 
two  black  rings,  and  I  shall  see  black  rings;  or 
I  can  look  at  the  interval  between  the  circles, 
and  see  a  white  ring ;  and  if  I  turn  away,  I  can 
still  keep  my  intention,  and  see  the  one  I  choose 
again,  according  to  my  chosen  memory. 

This  very  humble  illustration  is  thus  akin  to 
the  splendid  spectacles  that  are  written  in  the 
clouds  of  sunset ;  and  in  the  same  way,  we  see, 
on  a  little  piece  of  paper  upon  which  Rem- 
brandt has  scratched  a  few  lines,  some  vast  hori- 
zon of  open  plain,  masses  of  trees,  or  whatever 
he  has  wished  us  to  see  with  him,  so  long  as  he 
can  appeal  to  our  memories  of  things  seen. 

This  hieroglyph  has  evoked  in  us  certain 
images  of  memory :  and  still  more  strangely,  a 
single  line  has  given  us  the  idea  of  a  solid  body, 
—  which  our  eyes  see,  in  what  we  call  reality, 
as  a  surface  of  at  least  two  dimensions. 

Let  us  grant  —  and  it  is  not  certain  —  that 
this  line  reproduces  or  copies  the  outline  of  the 
object.     The  difficulty  does  not  decrease ;  in  our 


102  LECTURE  in 

general  use  of  the  eyes,  just  what  we  notice  least 
is  this  outline  of  objects.  What  we  apprehend 
of  anything  is  its  full  spread,  which  is  always 
a  coloured  surface  having  a  given  form, —  a 
modelled  pattern,  not  an  outline. 

So  that  the  line  of  the  draughtsman  is  not 
the  thing  he  wishes  me  to  look  at.  He  makes 
it  to  determine  the  shape  of  the  object,  which  I, 
as  it  were,  cut  out  by  imagination  from  the  white 
surface  of  the  paper.  What  he  means  me  to  see 
is  the  interior,  within  his  line.  I  can  follow  his 
line,  but  then  I  cease  to  see  the  thing  as  he 
represents  it :  if  my  imagination  fixes  on  the 
manner  in  which  he  has  represented  the  thing, 
the  outline  is  but  a  shadow  on  the  edge.  This 
is  so  true,  in  our  usual  way  of  looking  at  draw- 
ings with  little  but  outline,  that  when  the  line 
is  thicker,  we  feel  an  intention  of  representa- 
tion of  shadow;  and  any  inaccuracy,  any  want 
of  sensitiveness  in  such  a  use  of  the  outline, 
annoys  us  like  a  gross  blemish.  Compare  the 
line  trembling  with  meaning  of  Raphael  or 
Lionardo,  now  light,  now  heavy,  now  wide,  now 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  103 

narrow,  though  apparently  struck  out  at  a  single 
blow  —  with  the  stupid  intentions  of  shadowing 
in  the  outlines  of  the  outline  engravings  of  the 
beginning  and  middle  of  this  century.  Compare 
Blake's  outlines  after  Flaxman  with  those  of 
weaker,  conventional  and  proper  copyists. 

In  such  a  case  we  decide  that  the  increased 
width  of  dark  belongs  to  the  figure  represented. 
We  do  this  by  our  own  will,  which  has  been 
started  on  its  path  by  the  intention  or  will  of 
the  artist.  If,  indeed,  he  has  made  a  mistake, 
however  brutal,  and  he  meets  it  fairly,  —  recog- 
nizing it,  and  leaving  the  blotch  of  a  patch, — 
our  mind  joins  with  his,  and  we  take  the  edge 
of  the  line  that  belongs  to  the  figure  as  the 
one  he  must  have  meant. 

Thus,  as  the  line  is  only  meant  to  separate  — 
meant  to  divide  the  figure  represented  from  its 
background,  say  of  white  paper;  as  it  is  an 
abstraction,  we  shall  feel  the  need  of  destroying 
it  when  we  come  to  paint  fully.  The  more  full 
and  abundant  the  details,  the  richer  in  modelling, 
in  colour,  in  light  and  shade,  the  more  the  per- 


104  LECTURE  m 

sistence  of  the  arbitrary  outline  annoys  us.  We 
allow  it  only  when  the  painting  is  imperfect,  flat, 
conventional,  unreal  —  in  other  words,  wheji  some- 
thing is  wanting  which  we  replace  by  a  conven- 
tion. We  see  the  fact  at  its  worst  in  the  poorer 
kinds  of  what  is  called  artistic  stained  glass, 
where  the  lead  outlines  stand  out  unbidden, 
imconnected.^ 

1  You  will  remember  that  this  persistence  of  the  outline,  of  the 
abstraction,  remains  in  certain  artistic  works  of  high  type  ;  for  in- 
stance, in  the  fine  or  mediocre  Greek  vases  —  in  the  first  paintings  of  the 
modem  period  —  in  most  of  the  Florentine  —  the  most  exquisite  ones 
—  and  even  somewhat  in  Michael  Angelo's  great  frescoes.  We  see  it« 
maintenance  and  assertion  in  old  Japanese  and  Chinese  art  —  in  such 
examples,  for  instance,  as  those  lately  shown  in  the  Museum  at  Bos- 
ton. But  there  of  course,  as  in  several  of  the  cases  just  referred  to, 
the  line  is  more  abstract  yet  than  the  mere  outline  serving  to  give 
the  place,  and  it  is  used  as  a  special  refinement  —  a  sort  of  orches- 
tral accompaniment,  which  holda  the  looser  details  in  a  firm  net  of 
harmonious  arrangement. 

The  dignity  of  abstraction,  of  synthetic  choice,  of  refined  absten- 
tion, is  so  evident,  that  a  judicious  imitation  of  it  has  always  been 
in  favour,  and  hence  the  continual  tendency  to  attribute  meaning  to 
the  works  of  art  which  insist  on  a  prominence  of  this  feature  of  line 
or  outline.  It  is  sometimes  put  in  anyhow  rather  than  it  should  be 
wanting  or  not  very  visible ;  and  even  incorrect  as  it  usually  is  — 
except  in  great  cases,  —  it  is  an  appeal  to  culture,  on  which  many 
artists  and  many  schools  have  lived. 

And  if  you  will  reflect  a  little,  you  will  see  why  the  Frenchmen  of 
the  eighteenth  ceutur}',  with  the  insistence  of  the  line  in  their  Tragedy, 


SUGGESTION  AND   INTENTION  105 

All  that  the  draughtsman,  in  such  a  matter 
as  rendering  by  outlines  can  give,  is  the  separa- 
tion of  a  figure  from  the  background.  It  is  we 
who  endow  it  with  life  and  resemblance.  It  is 
our  knowledge  of  the  play  of  features  that 
makes  us  see  the  movement  of  expression  in  a 
couple  of  lines  of  a  caricaturist,  and  recognize  a 
likeness  in  some  few  traits  put  together. 

Yes,  it  is  all  very  simple :  a  line  or  two  on 
the  paper,  and  the  spectator  sees  his  friend,  or 
a  great  landscape  is  spread  for  him;  the  glories 
of  sea  and  sky,  the  expression  of  feeling  and  of 
passion,  the  cadences  of  action.  Yes,  that  would 
be  easy,  if  any  one  could  see  in  it  whatever  he 
chose  to.  But  the  decision  of  the  creator  of  the 
drawing  is  final.  The  variety  of  dreamland  into 
which  we  enter  depends  on  his  manner  of  open- 
ing the  gate.  And  the  less  he  does,  or  rather 
appears  to  do,  the  more  effort  is  required  for  all 
that  we   have    to   do.     We   scarcely  wonder   at 

found  it  impossible  to  care  for  Shakespeare,  in  whose  works  the  line 
is  covered  up  —  or  rather  they  found  him  (and  they  were  relatively 
right,  as  you  will  see)  too  natural  —  recording  too  truly  the  varied 
aspect  of  nature,  which  has  no  outlines  set. 


106  LECTURE  m 

it,  and  it  is  only  in  certain  greater  cases  that 
we  recognize,  through  our  uplifting  and  exhilara- 
tion, how  grand  that  simple  effort  may  be. 

Thus,  again,  it  is  the  intention  of  the  artist, 
not  his  adequate  copying,  that  makes  us  under- 
stand him.  And  the  larger  his  intention,  the 
more  he  includes,  the  less  he  actually  gives, 
the  more  we  feel  the  magic  of  the  wand  — 
his  pencil,  his  graver,  his  brush-point  full  of 
India  ink. 

And  this  magic  will  continue  when,  assuming 
to  use  more  than  line,  he  gives  us  effects  of 
light  and  shade,  and  fills  in  the  spaces  of  out- 
line that  divide  his  paper,  with  gradations  of 
light  and  dark,  which   may  mean  as  he  wishes, 

—  and  as  we  are  persuaded ;  that  is  to  say, 
modellings  of  form,  shadows  or  sunshine,  spot- 
tings  and  deviations  of  colour  or  of  light. 

The  surface  of  the  paper  may  be  dusty  with 
charcoal  or  crayon  —  greasy  with  printer's  black 

—  we  see  other  things  than  those  upon  the  level 
of  the  paper. 

Nay,   he  may  have  drawn  in  white    upon   a 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION        107 

black  ground,  as  when  he  draws  upon  a  slate; 
and  we  sympathize  with  the  struggle ;  —  the  white 
marks  which  indicate  how  black  the  hair;  how 
deep  the  red  of  the  lips. 

If  his  drawing  be  on  grey  paper,  we  can  see 
the  light  tone  of  the  light  and  follow  its  vari- 
ations. Has  he  not  made  us  believe  that  wher- 
ever he  has  not  put  dark  the  place  is  to  be 
called  light,  —  the  glitter  of  metal,  the  glow 
of  the  sky,  the  shine  of  the  sunlight  ?  He  may 
care  more  for  the  light  and  dark  which  to  us 
mean  form,  and  he  may  abstract  for  the  thing 
he  wishes  to  represent  certain  details,  as  those 
of  form,  and  abandon  all  representation  of  the 
full  look  of  nature.  That  is  to  say,  he  may 
be  what  the  French  call  a  dessinateur,  —  an 
exclusive  lover  of  line  or  form.  Or  he  may 
propose  to  himself,  with  Rembrandt,  a  synop- 
sis of  everything  that  the  eye  can  take  in, 
—  colour  and  light  and  shade,  form  and  the 
movement  of  form,  and  the  peculiar  tone  which 
envelops  each  picture  that  we  make  in  looking 
at  nature. 


108  LECTURE  III 

For  each  separately  and  all  together  of  these 
results,  he  may  make  lines  and  spots  upon  a 
ground  of  white.  Their  joining  or  their  sepa- 
ration will  make,  at  the  distance  from  the 
drawing  that  we  assume,  a  tint  which  means 
to  us  the  tint  of  nature.  The  cross  lines  and 
cross  hatchings  of  an  engraving  rush  together 
at  a  certain  distance,  and  the  eye  feels  in  them 
a  continued  impression  of  tint  darker  or  lighter 
as  the  marks  are  nearer  or  further  apart. 

Even  if  our  eye  sees  that  this  fusion  is  im- 
perfect, we  know  so  well  what  is  meant  that 
we  are  not  troubled  by  the  drawing  of  shadow 
in  a  head  of  Lionardo,  for  instance,  through 
a  number  of  parallel  straight  lines,  put  not 
closely  together.  We  see  those  lines  not  as 
lines  but  as  one  shadow.  And  you  follow,  in 
the  same  way,  the  intention  of  the  line  en- 
graver, when  his  curves  describe  the  shape  of 
what  he  wishes.  You  know  that  a  woman's 
arm  is  not  covered  with  curved  stripes;  you 
know  that  the  human  face  is  not  tattooed  with 
fine  lines  fitting  its  form.     But  you    recognize 


SUGaESTION  AND  INTENTION  109 

the  intention.  The  lines  are  the  section,  ap- 
parently, of  the  place  where  they  are  put; 
and  this  accumulation  of  sections,  if  correct, 
reassures  you  as  to  your  pursuit  of  the  form 
in  the  engraving. 

So  that  we  follow,  indeed,  only  the  mind  of 
the  artist.  When  he  leaves  this  system  of  lines, 
which  describes  form  as  a  soft  bracelet  describes 
the  shape  of  the  arm  of  a  woman,  and  when 
he  suddenly  adopts  a  new  system  of  lines  to 
mark  that  he  is  not  thinking  of  form  but  of 
shadow,  we  follow  him  again  into  another  form 
of  artifice,  and  see  as  he  wishes.  In  the  differing 
arrangement  of  lines  or  dots,  he  may  now  give 
us  the  impression  of  texture,  now  the  impression 
of  the  tint  he  wishes  to  represent. 

If  he  has  a  given  quantity  of  white  and  of 
black,  the  effect  will  be  much  less,  when  he  rubs 
them  together  and  makes  a  grey,  than  when  he 
leaves  the  same  quantity  of  white  and  black 
side  by  side,  and  makes  them  affect  the  eye  and 
excite  it  by  contrast.  In  such  a  case  he  may 
place   them   together,  without   mixing,  in   innu- 


110  LECTURE  III 

merable  combinations;  each  arrangement,  as  in 
the  art  of  the  wood  engraver,  will  give  a  sepa- 
rate tint,  and  their  greatest  amount  of  black  will 
even  yet  be  transparent,  because  it  will  be  per- 
meated by  the  lustre  of  some  separate  little 
white  spots  and  lines. 

This,  by  the  bye,  is  one  of  the  systems  used 
by  some  of  the  latest  modern  painters,  —  im- 
pressionists, pointillisteSf  etc.  Photographed  for 
that  purpose,  their  placing  of  colour  side  by  side 
resembles  the  mechanism  of  engraving  on  wood, 
which  may  have  given  the  first  idea.  In  this 
case,  as  in  the  case  of  the  little  checker  patterns, 
the  little  rain  of  dots  of  the  wood  engraver, 
our  eye  is  first  excited  by  one  colour,  then 
calmed  by  another;  in  the  painting  by  a  con- 
trast of  colour,  in  the  engraving  by  contrast  of 
light  and  dark.  The  energies  of  nature,  there- 
fore, —  not  their  realities,  — are  translated  by 
our  own  energies.* 

The    process,   which    is    extremely   interesting 

1  Indecisions  of  seeing  —  our  not  seeing  all  with  equal  distinctness, 
which  is  part  of  our  sight  as  well  as  seeing  distinctly  —  are  recalled 
also  by  such  methods. 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  HI 

from  the  indefinite  extension  it  can  receive,  is 
the  one  we  see  in  stuffs  and  brocades.  The 
Japanese  silks  and  brocades  and  common  cotton 
goods  offer  us  an  endless  series  of  wonderful 
solutions  of  the  problem,  where  the  colour  re- 
sulting from  these  dissociations  of  values  makes 
a  bloom  difficult  to  render  into  words  by  name, 
extremely  difficult  to  render  by  colour  of  one 
homogeneous  mixture.  And  indeed  we  can  see 
those  effects  given  in  this  singular  manner  by 
the  patterns  especially  used  for  men's  clothes, 
in  which  ever  so  many  "shades,"  as  they  are 
called,  of  grey,  are  produced  by  the  placing  of 
alternate  spots  or  stripes  of  black  and  white, 
which  only  mix  in  the  eye,  and  get  their  effective 
existence  there.  These  humble  methods  of  the 
men  who  make  the  patterns  of  your  trousers  are, 
in  another  very  complicated  way,  the  methods 
through  which  Rembrandt  has  awakened  your 
appreciation  of  light  and  dark.  Those  scratches 
of  different  sizes ;  those  blotches  of  white,  more 
or  less  stained ;  those  lines,  now  blurred,  now 
sharp,  have   allowed   him  to  make,  on  a  bit  of 


112  LECTURE  ra 

paper,  pictures  as  wonderful  as  any  painting  ever 
painted;  as  full  of  reality,  of  mystery,  of  imag- 
ination, of  intensity  of  natural  and  supernatural 
life  as  his  stupendous  paintings  themselves. 

It  is  always  hard  to  pass  from  what  delights 
us,  but  wherever,  as  we  have  decided  in  our  first 
considerations,  wherever  any  full  method,  any 
adequate  clothing  created  by  the  artist  for  his 
ideas,  has  resulted  from  his  using  all  his  powers, 
there  has  been  a  mockery  made  by  others,  an 
imitation  of  the  methods,  a  copying  of  the  outside 
clothing.  Now  curiously  enough,  just  here,  we 
can  again  recall  in  our  first  classification  of  imita- 
tion, of  a  manner  of  looking  at  nature  as  if  she 
were  petrified  and  crystallized,  in  some  shape 
far  from  her  fluid  readiness  to  change ;  far  from 
her  being  seen  by  us  only  through  colour  and  light 
ever  varying. 

In  certain  etchings,  for  instance,  we  can  see 
quite  distinctly  what  is  obscurely  hinted  at 
through  many  works  of  art  of  different  pro- 
cesses of  execution.  Many  times  we  see  in  work 
that  we  feel  is  poorer,  the  etching  of  an  etching. 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  113 

if  I  may  so  say,  the  rendering  into  black  and 
white  of  a  nature  —  for  anything  outside  us  is 
nature  —  all  in  black  and  white,  which  nature 
is  created  for  the  purpose  in  the  inferior  artist's 
mind.  For  the  glories  of  nature  in  which  we  lose 
ourselves  are  not  the  glories  of  black  and  white 
•abstraction.  The  spaces  that  we  see  are  seen  by 
us  as  coloured  light  (if  I  may  so  put  it),  and  he 
whom  we  call  the  painter,  most  of  all  artists, 
emphasizes  his  recognition  of  this  luminous  col- 
oured impression  under  which  all  things  are  seen. 
It  matters  not,  though  it  be  not  clear  at  first, 
that  he  has  used  only  black  and  white ;  in  any 
case  when  he  has  wished  to  give  the  sensation 
of  nature,  he  has  made  a  synthesis  of  this  lumi- 
nous impression,  which  in  some  way  bears  out 
the  suggestion  of  something  more  than  black 
and  white  being  copied  in  his  representation. 
Never  has  he  or  any  artist  of  full  life  copied  or 
represented  the  representation.  I  have  named  the 
etcher  as  most  evident  in  such  a  failure,  most 
tiresome  in  his  copying  the  look  of  an  etching  — 
not  the  look  of  things  that  etching  fairly  conveys. 


114  LECTURE  m 

So  the  water-colourist  imitates  a  water  colour, 
and  the  oil-painter  the  look  of  what  I  have  been 
told  was  a  real  hand-painted  oil  colour.  The  sur- 
face, the  contexture  of  some  kind  of  work  of  art 
is  in  their  minds.  Many  a  painter  of  the  begin- 
ning of  the  century  saw  Roman  statues  when  he 
looked  at  his  model.  Indeed  it  might  be  said 
that  he  even  saw  his  model  in  the  form  of  a 
plaster  casting.  Only  the  strong  obsession  of 
another  individuality  in  nature,  and  the  influence 
of  earlier  studies,  forced  him  occasionally,  as 
with  David  when  painting  portraits,  into  a  pur- 
suit of  the  luminous  and  intimate  changes  which 
are  impossible  out  of  the  moving  flesh  and  blood. 
Remember  now  that  I  am  only  speaking  in  a 
general  way,  and  that  each  case  has  its  own 
record.  Because  again,  extreme  and  delicate 
beauty  can  be  obtained  even  in  such  artificial 
arrangements.  But  they  need  a  man  behind  them, 
and  he  must  make  an  attempt  to  conciliate  them 
with  what  he  feels  of  all  nature.  Thus  in  Prud- 
hon's  lovely  work,  the  "  plaster-cast "  shadows 
look   no   longer  like   admiration   of   the   statue, 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  115 

but  become  certain  types  of  beauties  of  shade, 
such  as  are  felt  by  us  in  the  mysterious  destruc- 
tion of  colour  values  by  moonlight. 

And  there  are  even  sculptors  who  have  managed 
to  give  you  an  impression  that  the  originals  they 
pursued  in  imitation  were  already  cast  in  plaster.^ 

We  have  passed  already  too  far  away  from  the 
first  question  of  the  rendering  of  many  things  by 
a  single  one,  of  the  suggestion  of  things  that  are 
not  there.  Any  artist  who  has  kept  many  studies 
of  his  own  will  remember  the  manner  in  which 
we  select  out  of  some  drawing  certain  lines,  cer- 
tain marks, — because  it  may  be  a  drawing  having 
more  or  less  colour  added  to  it  or  shade.  We 
select  out  of  the  marks  on  the  paper  certain  ones 
which  bring  back,  by  connection  with  memory, 
the  entire  picture  which  we  saw  at  the  time  that 
we  made  it ;  whether  those  lines  were  records  of 
nature  or  records  of  the  imagination  —  that  is  to 
say,   of  the  intention   of   doing   something.      It 

1  Even  in  Japanese  lacquers  yoii  can  distinguish  those  which  repre- 
sent nature  in  gold  or  black  varnish  from  those  vfhich  represent  well- 
executed  lacquer  patterns. 


116  LECTURE  m 

might  be  even  such  a  question  as  the  indication  of 
a  whole  subject  by  the  supposed  main  lines  repre- 
senting movement,  which  movement  fully  carried 
out  in  all  its  details,  and  placed  in  what  might  be 
called  a  body,  was  to  make,  by  a  process  of  evolu- 
tion, a  completed  work  of  art. 

Last  Wednesday  Mr.  Cazin  was  reminding  me 
of  the  danger  of  looking  over  former  notes  and 
studies  when  out  of  them  some  one  had  to  be 
found  which  we  needed  at  once;  the  tendency, 
as  one  came  across  each  special  record,  to  see  an 
entire  scene  —  either  a  scene  in  nature  or  a  scene 
that  had  occurred  in  our  mind,  in  which,  delighted 
with  the  delight  of  former  memories,  we  rebuilt 
the  entire  world  of  former  experience,  and  forgot 
at  each  time  that  on  some  other  piece  of  paper,  on 
some  other  sheet  of  an  album,  was  the  one  little 
dry  separate  fact  that  we  had  wished  to  consult. 
And  he  added :  "  I  sometimes  do  not  care  to  look 
over  them  myself ;  I  find  some  friend  —  some  one 
in  the  family,  who  is  willing  to  hunt  out  the 
special  thing ;  because  he  has  no  other  association 
than  that  of  the  moment." 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  117 

Who  shall  fathom  the  mystery  of  the  impres- 
sions made  by  art  —  unpressions  which  become 
confused,  when  one  tries  to  declare  them  and 
describe  them;  strong  and  clear  if  we  feel  them 
again,  even  by  the  recall  of  memory ;  so  that  we 
realize  how  much  of  ourselves  constituted  the 
feelings  that  seemed  to  come  out  of  the  things 
that  struck  us.  In  our  art  these  impressions  are 
tangible,  if  I  may  say  so.  "We  enjoy  what  we 
think  is  the  representation  of  the  certain  things,  at 
the  same  time  that  some  sense  of  what  they  mean 
for  our  mind  affects  and  moves  us.  These  figures, 
these  objects,  which  seem  to  be  the  thing  itself  to 
a  certain  part  of  our  intelligence,  make  a  sort  of 
bridge  over  which  we  pass  to  reach  that  mysteri- 
ous impression  which  is  represented  by  form  as  a 
sort  of  hieroglyph ;  a  speaking,  living  hieroglyph, 
not  such  a  one  as  is  replaced  by  a  few  characters 
of  writing ;  in  our  art  and  in  that  sense  a  sublime 
means  and  creation  of  man,  if  we  compare  it  to 
that  in  which  thought  can  reach  us  only  through 
conventional  arrangements  of  the  signs  we  call 
letters.     An  art  more  complicated  certainly  than 


118  LECTURE  III 

literature,  but  infinitely  more  expressive,  since, 
independently  of  the  idea,  its  sign,  its  living  hiero- 
glyph, fills  the  soul  of  the  painter  with  the  splen- 
dour that  things  give  ;  their  beauty,  their  contrast, 
their  harmony,  their  colours,  —  all  the  undivided 
order  of  the  external  universe.^ 

Later,  we  may  consider,  if  we  have  time,  the 
enormous  difference  between  the  representation, 
even  incomplete,  through  the  thing  itself,  and  the 
representation  by  a  name  for  it. 

Should  you  hesitate  a  moment,  and  believe  — 
or  rather  imagine  —  that  the  reasons  I  give  are 
subtle,  are  fine-drawn,  pause  a  moment  and  ask 
yourselves,  on  the  contrary,  whether  they  are  not 
gross,  heavy  attempts  at  handling  with  words  a 
thing  so  subtle  even  as  the  representation  of  any- 
thing by  a  line.  If,  in  fact,  I  can  express  these 
ideas  adequately  in  words  of  ordinary  language,  I 
must  have  left  a  great  deal  unexplained.  Art  be- 
gins where  language  ceases,  and  the  impressions 
that  we  receive,  and  the  manners  through  which 
we  render  them,  are  in  themselves  so  subtle  that 

*  Paraphrased  from  Delacroix, 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  119 

no  one  yet  has  been  able  to  analyze  more  than  a 
certain  exterior  or  part  of  the  mechanism  of  sensa- 
tion and  of  representation.  I  have  said  art  —  I 
mean  of  course  our  arts,  painting,  sculpture,  archi- 
tecture, music. 

Do  not  let  us  talk  of  our  putting  down  —  re- 
cording —  what  was  there ;  there  was  there  what 
we  intended  to  see.  The  religious  feeling  of  the 
religious  painters  of  the  past  had  no  other  means 
of  expression  than  the  faces  of  the  people  they 
saw  about  them.  The  women  living  then,  whose 
faces  are  enshrined  for  us  in  the  pictures  of 
Christian  sanctity,  were  not  different  from  those 
of  to-day.  They  had  the  same  lightness  of  mind, 
the  same  caring  for  fashion,  the  same  meannesses, 
the  same  devotion,  the  same  high  pure-mindedness, 
that  they  have  to-day.  From  what  they  showed, 
the  artist  who  cared  for  the  higher  things  chose 
what  he  cared  for.  He  who  did  not  see,  as  we  say 
—  that  is  to  say,  who  did  not  mean,  —  gave  us 
dryness,  hardness  and  meanness  of  character  in 
the  early  portraits  of  those  same  periods  when 
religious  art  flourished. 


120  LECTURE  in 

My  students,  perhaps,  have  never  read  the  jour- 
nal of  the  painter,  Francis  of  Holland,  who  went 
to  Rome,  and  knew  Vittoria  Colonna,  and  through 
her  kindness  managed  to  meet  Michael  Angelo, 
and  to  record,  a  few  expressions  of  his.  They 
may  remember  Francis's  portrait  of  the  glorious 
old  gentleman,  a  demigod  of  art,  with  his  collar 
up,  with  his  hat  pulled  down,  and  the  gloves  he 
wore  to  protect  him,  —  the  Michael  Angelo  who 
at  that  time  passed  through  the  streets  of  Rome  to 
make  his  calls.  It  is  years  since  I  saw  the  journal 
of  Francis  of  Holland :  and  I  quote  from  a  long 
memory.  But  something  like  this  was  said  in  the 
cool  chapel  of  the  closed  church  of  San  Silvestro 
in  Monte  Cavallo  —  in  answer  to  the  questions 
they  asked :  "  Of  what  consisted  elevation  in  paint- 
ing: is  it  the  representation  of  great  and  splendid 
things,  of  angels  and  saints  —  and  robes  and  back- 
grounds of  gold?" 

"Good  painting,"  said  Michael  Angelo,  "is 
noble  and  devout  in  itself,  for  with  the  wise 
nothing  elevates  more  the  soul  and  turns  it 
toward  devotion  than  the  difficulty  of  perfection, 


SUGGESTION  AND  INTENTION  121 

which  is  a  tendency  to  approach  God  and  to  be 
united  to  Him ;  for  good  painting  is  as  a  copy  of 
His  perfections,  a  shadow  of  His  brush?  a  music,  a 
melody. 

"  The  painting  of  which  I  speak,  and  which  I 
praise,  asks  only  the  imitation  of  one  of  the  innu- 
merable things  which  God's  Infinite  Wisdom  has 
created,  —  be  it  [a  fish  of  the  market-place  or]  a 
bird  of  the  air." 

The  heavy  record  of  Francis  of  Holland  runs 
somewhat  like  this :  but  out  of  much  tedious 
misrendering,  speaks  the  real  voice  of  the  man 
whose  versified  poetry  expresses  an  anxious  sense 
of  the  spiritual  world.  If  we  only  see  that  paint- 
ing, in  the  words  of  Delacroix,  another  very  great 
artist,  requires  the  whole  man  ("  veut  son  homme 
tout  en  tier"),  this  humble  dedication  of  Michael 
Angelo's  powers  need  not  surprise  us. 

As  the  creature  represents  in  itself  a  record  of 
the  forces  that  have  made  it  and  made  also  the 
world,  and  as  it  is  in  so  far  an  epitome  of  the 
universe,  so  the  man  who  brings  his  mind  to  con- 
template the  creature,  is  himself  communicating 


122  LECTURE  m 

with  the  entire  world.  He  is  acting  in  the  spirit 
of  poetry,  which  touches  us  by  establishing,  over 
and  over  again,  this  connection  of  ourselves  with 
the  universe ;  through  our  seeing  how,  in  the 
poet's  mind,  some  single  thought,  sometimes  some 
mere  fancy,  some  mere  word,  has  ties  with  all 
that  we  care  for  most,  with  the  very  foundations 
upon  which  we  live. 


LECTURE  IV 


MISAPPEEHENSIONS  OF  MEANING 


SYNOPSIS  OF  LECTURE  TV 

What  we  see  in  an  artist's  representation  is  our  sight  of  our  mem- 
ories in  it.  —  This  not  equally  possible  for  all.  —  Ignorance  or  oppres- 
sive knowledge  may  interfere.  — Difficulties  that  may  stand  in  the  way 
of  appreciation.  —  Difficulties  in  the  way  of  the  painter's  free  sight 
owing  to  training.  — The  artist's  frequent  narrowness  not  unnatural. 
—  Often  it  is  the  proof  of  a  final  closing  of  his  susceptibility.  — Rea- 
sons for  not  enjoying  certain  works  of  art.  —  The  student  may  add  to 
his  powers  from  what  is  furthest  away  from  him  in  art.  —  Of  necessity 
the  artist's  own  record  of  memories  may  come  to  be  understood  only 
M  other  people's  memories  accumulate,  if  he  goes  beyond  what  all 
expect.  —  Hence  time  must  be  a  factor  in  the  growth  of  appreciation. 


LECTURE  IV 

MISAPPREHENSIONS   OF   MEANING 

We  shall  have  seen,  then,  that  the  illusion 
suggested  by  the  artist's  work  is  directed  by  him, 
but  mostly  made  by  us;  that  we  no  longer  see 
his  mere  piece  of  canvas,  when  he  tells  us  that 
it  is  a  hollow  mirror  of  the  world;  that  the 
marks  he  makes  upon  the  piece  of  grey  or  white 
paper  become  to  us  memories  of  what  we  have 
seen  or  desired  to  see ;  and  that,  though  I  know 
that  this  is  Naples  yellow,  that  that  is  cobalt, 
that  I  can  name  each  colour  and  each  mixture 
of  colour,  in  the  five-minute  sketch  that  Turner 
puts  on  a  bit  of  Whatman,  I  can  at  the  same 
time  that  I  see  them  all  separately,  the  paper, 
the  kind  of  colour,  the  paint  and  brush-mark, 
see  also  the  blue  Mediterranean  basking  in  the 
southern  sun. 


126  LECTURE  IV 

We  have  looked  a  little  way  into  the  mystery 
implied  in  those  scratches  that  the  savage,  or  a 
Rembrandt,  makes,  —  and  we  saw  in  what  is 
called  drawing  a  natural  convention,  a  manner 
of  synthesis  and  suggestion;  in  it  man  speaks 
to  man  by  lines  that  imply  things.  And  we  can 
think  of  these  as  a  bridge  over  which  our  spirit 
passes,  beyond  these  things  implied,  to  reach  still 
further,  to  newer  sights,  or  to  some  meaning 
more  or  less  recognized  by  us,  according  io  the 
intensity  of  our  desire,  according  to  memories 
suggested  to  our  view  of  our  relations  with 
the  universe,  or  what  the  universe  itself  may 
mean. 

Then,  in  another  attempt  at  limitation,  at 
definition,  I  said  that  art  begins  where  language 
ceases;  and  as  I  said  it,  I  was  reminded  again 
of  the  wider  and  vaguer  sense  of  the  word  art, 
which,  however,  we  cannot  better. 

I  thought  how  the  writer,  the  poet,  uses  words, 
and  how  their  ordinary  use  and  value  are  changed 
by  him ;  how  their  ordinary  position  is  misplaced, 
that  he  may  convey,  through  his  art,  an  illusion 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  127 

impossible   to  the  average   language,  which  lan- 
guage is  not  personal  with  him. 

By  his  cadences,  by  the  stress  laid  upon  cer- 
tain words,  by  his  placing  of  words  in  an  artificial 
frame,  the  poet  suggests,  not  the  actual  thing 
itself  that  he  says,  but  what  our  memories  will 
make  of  it ;  as  soon  as  he  has  thrown  us  out  of 
the  hearing  of  the  language  of  every  day. 

A  line  came  back  to  me,  while  I  read  my  own 
words  to  you,  a  line  of  Virgil ;  a  line  loved  by 
Millet  the  painter ;  remembered  by  me,  perhaps, 
because  of  its  association  with  the  story  of  his 
painting : 

"  Majoresque  cadunt  altis  de  montibus  umbrae." 

Certainly,  the  real  fact  of  the  shadows  grad- 
ually filling  the  plain  below  the  mountains  was 
known  to  Millet ;  but  when  he  repeated  the  line, 
or  saw  it  aloud  —  if  I  may  so  say — he  felt  how 
the  word  "  Majores,"  which  means  only  greater, 
is  placed  so  as  to  suggest  constantly  greater  in- 
crease ;  and  how  the  shadows,  which  end  the 
line  in  the  soft  word  "umbrae,"  that  means 
these,   have   spread   from    the   beginning  of   the 


128  LECTURE  IV 

line,  and  have  descended,  as  if  with  a  fall,  from 
the  high  mountains. 

And  again,  we  said  that  we  saw  what  we 
intended  to  see,  we  who  paint;  and  Michael 
Angelo  defined  for  us  what  made  a  religious 
painting,  by  the  spiritual  attitude  of  the  painter. 
Through  these  followings  and  pursuit  of  the  fact 
that  each  artist  sees  in  his  own  way,  through 
memories  of  what  he  has  been,  and  of  what  he 
has  liked ;  even  when  he  says  to  himself,  in  asser- 
tive moments,  that  "that  is  the  way  the  thing 
looked,"  we  shall  come  to  perceive,  perhaps,  why 
it  is,  that  this  faceting  of  truth  must  be  so, — 
how  the  perpetual  Maia,  the  illusion  and  enchant- 
ment of  appearances,  plays  for  each  of  us  a  new 
part,  sings  for  us  a  new  personal  song,  —  as  if 
she  returned  our  admiration  —  as  if  she  cared  — 
indeed,  as  if  she  existed,  in  the  way  that  we  say 
we  know  her;  for  she  takes  form  in  us  and  fits 
our  shapes. 

If,  therefore,  we  cannot  separate  ourselves  from 
what  we  see  ;  if  our  energies  are  necessary  to  help 
the  artist  to  impress  us ;  if  what  he  appeals  to  us 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  129 

about  is  not  an  actual  sight,  but  merely  our  sight 
of  our  memories  in  it,  so  that  we  could  not  put 
these  things  to  a  man  born  blind  on  his  first 
recovery  of  sight,  we  know  that  it  is  because  at 
least  a  great  part  of  the  influence  exerted  by*  the 
artist  is  the  recall  to  our  own  experience  of  our 
own  memory.  We  build  upon  that,  and  recog- 
nizing its  conformity  with  that  of  the  artist's 
memory,  we  trust  him  and  continue  beyond  ex- 
perience to  whatever  new  sights  he  may  wish  to 
lead  us  among.  But  we  must  believe  first  in  the 
conformity  with  our  own  of  these  first  memories 
of  his  which  he  offers  us. 

Now  this  is  not  equally  possible  for  all ;  it  will 
depend  upon  our  sensitiveness,  our  capacities  of 
all  kinds.^     To  some  kinds  of  intellect  certain  con- 

1  Sensitiveness  —  at  the  word  I  pause  for  a  moment.  Has  it  ever 
occurred  to  you  how  excusable  are  the  misapprehensions  of  many 
literary  critics  of  pictures  —  such  as  any  of  you  of  my  hearers  who 
are  artists  may  have  suffered  from  in  yourselves,  or  in  what  is  still 
more  aggravating,  the  mis  judgment  of  greater  men  —  all  of  whom 
have  suffered  in  that  way  ?  Constable,  G^ricault,  Delacroix,  Millet, 
Rousseau,  Manet,  Corot,  —  the  list  is  great. 

Just  think  a  moment. 

The  different  arts  have  each  and  in  common,  one  property  which 
is  Expression :  based  on  a  correspondence  between  the  sensations  of 


130  LECTURE  IV 

tradictions  to  their  memories  of  sight  will  he  so 
important  that  those  contradictions  —  the  defi- 
ciencies of  the  painter  or  artist,  will  prove  insur- 
moimtable.  The  reminder  of  the  illusion  will  not 
take   place   with   them   to   a  sufficient  extent  to 

the  soul  and  the  sensations  of  the  body.  A  colour,  a  line,  a  sound, 
may  influence  the  soul  with  a  similar  sentiment  of  result.  A  paint- 
ing, a  statue,  a  melody,  shall  cause  upon  us,  the  public,  a  similar 
moral  impression,  and  the  literary  critic  may  translate  it  for  the 
public  by  some  explanation  —  say  that  of  sweetness ;  and  that  with- 
out his  being  able  to  understand  what  is  properly  sculptural,  pictorial 
or  musical  in  this  triple  expression.  Notes,  lines  and  colours  smile 
or  weep,  are  sad  or  gay,  equally,  but  each  in  its  way.  And  yet  it 
is  neither  sadness  nor  joy  which  constitute  what  is  proper  to  music, 
to  painting  or  to  sculpture. 

Thus  each  art  has  its  particular  language  and  another  in  common 
understandable  by  all.  A  French  poet,  whose  thought  I  am  follow- 
ing, has  compared  three  arts,  painting,  sculpture  and  music,  to  three 
persons  speaking  in  three  languages,  say  French,  German  and  Italian, 
before  another  who  should  understand  only  English.  Now  there  are 
common  human  expressions  which  will  allow  these  three  persons  to 
be  understood  in  part,  but  certainly  not  in  all,  nor  in  what  is  most 
precise,  and  in  fact  only  in  what  each  person  would  consider  a  mere 
help  to  his  own  language. 

The  public  are  like  the  hearer :  because  they  feel,  they  therefore 
think  they  can  judge  works,  only  part  of  which  they  are  competent 
to  pronounce  upon. 

There  is  in  each  competent  artist  a  sort  of  unconscious  automatic 
mathematician,  who,  like  the  harmonist  in  music,  the  colourist  in 
painting,  resolves  in  his  way  the  problem  of  sight  or  sound  which  the 
scientist  puts  into  an  equation. 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  131 

move  the  entire  mind.  It  may  come  from  too 
much  ignorance;  it  may  come  from  too  oppres- 
sive a  knowledge  of  certain  facts.  We  should 
be  troubled  by  Shakespeare's  geography,  by  his 
statements  of  historic  fact,  and  the  characters  he 

And  yet  owing  to  the  extreme  difficulty  of  these  problems  and  the 
improbability  of  their  being  solved  completely  by  them,  people  have 
the  assurance  to  decide  about  them. 

Perhaps  this  may  be  the  cause  of  the  special  failures  of  the  critic 
of  paintings.  Music  has  been  noted.  It  is  not  possible  to  acknowl- 
edge that  one  does  not  know  one  note  from  another,  and  yet  criticise 
them.  But  the  plastic  arts  have  no  complete  notations.  (Archi- 
tecture, however,  can  use  some  notation.) 

These  differences  are  not  absolute,  but  are  relative  to  the  limits  of 
our  perceptions,  which  are  not  the  same  for  sight  and  sound. 

The  series  of  musical  sound  appears  to  us  discontinued.  Tlie 
gamut  could  not  be  figured  by  the  contiguous  positions  of  a  point 
moving  on  a  line.  The  gamut  would  be  more  like  the  stepping  of  a 
pair  of  compasses  on  a  right  line.  The  series  of  colours,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  continuous.  Hence  you  can  see  how  infinitely  more  difficult 
to  follow  and  to  define.  And  also  more  difficult  to  find  out  the  man 
who  makes  a  mistake  in  criticism  of  coloured  appearances.  Hence 
of  course  the  fact  that  the  painter  only  can  execute  his  painting :  he 
cannot  notate  it  in  colour.  And  so  for  the  lines,  which  are  born  of 
his  personality,  their  directions  imply  a  number  of  curves  whose 
radii  are  in  infinite  number  and  are  continuously  variable.  All  equa- 
tions fail  before  them  ;  at  least  by  the  means  of  scientific  analysis  of 
which  man  yet  disposes.  And  yet  we  know  that  they  must  be  obedi- 
ent to  the  Sovereign  Art  and  Science  which  has  moulded  the  world 
and  which  has  somewhere  above  us  an  adequate  notation. 

To  ask,  then,  of  the  average  critic  a  sensitiveness  capable  of  such 


182  LECTURE  IV 

builds,  were  we  not,  fortunately  for  our  apprecia- 
tion of  what  he  meant,  bowed  down  into  the  right 
attitude  by  the  pressure  of  long  continued  opinion. 
I  think  that  I  can  remember  my  professor  of 
anatomy's  objection  to  the  Venus  of  Milo,  about 
whose  hips  he  had  much  misgiving.  Something 
was  wrong  there,  (and  as  she  is  big)  with  no  small 
measure  of  blunder.  If  you  have  followed  your 
course  of  anatomy,  you  will  know  what  I  mean 
and  whether  the  trouble  has  been  removed  with 
the  readjustment  of  the  statue.  But  this  defect 
spoiled  the  pleasure  my  teacher  might  have  had. 
And  so  with  Barye's  animals,  which  my  teacher 
admired  freely  —  it  troubled  him  that  certain  de- 
formations  and   exaggerations   were   there;    and 

appreciation  is  cruel.  Music  and  its  rules  he  may  hold,  because 
explained  and  notated.  But  how  is  he  to  hear  the  Voice  of  Nature 
calling  to  the  painter,  unless  he  too  has  a  similar  physical  sensitiveness  ? 
For  from  what  we  saw  a  moment  ago,  when  we  noticed  the  subjec- 
tive continuity  of  the  impressions  of  colour,  and  the  infinity  of  line, 
you  can  see  why  nature,  the  world  of  the  eye,  is  always  singing  to 
the  painter.  The  notes  of  the  prism  continue  indefinitely,  and  the 
painter,  or  he  who  has  his  temperament,  sees  at  every  moment  in  the 
world  about  him  the  absolute  harmony  which  the  other  arts  obtain 
by  effort.  That  is  why  the  record  of  nature  is  the  painter's  manner 
of  expression. 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  133 

apparently  the  result  of  deliberate  purpose  with 
Barye,  —  the  intention,  perhaps,  which  had  be- 
come a  habit,  of  changing  the  scale  so  as  to  pro- 
duce the  impression  of  size ;  as  the  actual  bronze 
was  small,  but  had  to  appear  the  size  of  life.  Had 
these  been  the  errors  of  a  novice,  my  professor 
might  have  been  more  indulgent.  To  his  own 
modelled  works  my  teacher  was  more  indulgent. 
Their  defects  being  mixed  with  the  qualities  he  was 
looking  for,  he  easily  allowed  for  these  defects, 
and  could  create  for  himself  the  necessary  illusion. 
If  there  can  be  all  this  difference  of  apprecia- 
tion in  such  an  art  as  realistic  sculpture  —  if  I 
may  use  the  term  —  so  near  the  actual  form,  so 
tangible,  so  much  the  thing  itself  that  a  sculptor 
can  be  blind,  as  you  all  have  seen,  and  yet  make 
a  statue  or  image  whose  form  at  least,  if  not  the 
appearance  of  its  form,  will  be  correct,  —  how 
much  more  excusable  —  if  I  can  say  so  —  how 
much  more  pardonable,  will  such  deficiencies  of 
sympathy  appear  to  us  in  those  who  cannot  en- 
joy the  full  illusion  of  painting,  of  drawing;  of 
the  more  sublimated  manners  of  art. 


134  LECTURE  IV 

Any  sort  of  knowledge  (which  is  stored  mem- 
ory), any  memory  of  training,  any  kind  of  preju- 
dice, as  we  may  define  it,  may  stand  in  the  way 
of  appreciation. 

We  shall  see  the  result  of  a  sort  of  obsession 
in  the  intellect,  like  a  hard  deposit  in  a  living 
body,  prevent  the  free  action  of  its  energies,  and 
arrest  its  acquirement  of  new  sympathies.  As  in 
our  studies  and  the  records  of  the  impression  of 
nature  upon  us  artists,  in  the  things  we  do  be- 
fore new  sights,  in  the  notes  we  take  of  what  is 
new  to  us,  we  are  hampered  (fortunately  for  our 
self-esteem,  without  knowing  it  frequently)  by 
the  habits  of  memory  of  the  studio,  by  certain 
methods  of  painting  or  drawing  (and  of  sight 
even,  as  I  have  shown  you),  which  were  invented 
and  perfected  for  other  sorts  of  sight  and  things, 
seen  by  others  than  ourselves,  who  taught  them 
to  us ;  or  seen  by  ourselves,  under  conditions  far 
removed  in  the  past.  Hence  the  difficulties  of 
the  painter  who  brings  to  his  study  in  the  open 
air  of  the  New  World  —  harsh,  clear,  light- 
coloured,  crystalline  —  not  the  principles  but  the 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  135 

methods  he  has  learned  in  studios  of  grey  and 
rainy  France,  or  the  dry  formulas  of  school-bred 
Germany.  And  if  in  the  face  of  ever-changing 
nature,  he  is  overburdened  by  that  part  of  him- 
self which  has  hardened  like  his  bones,  and  he 
repaints  his  old  likings  of  studio  practice  —  how 
excusable  is  he  in  objecting  to  the  newer  impres- 
sions of  others :  the  works  of  others  who  are  not 
carrying  as  a  weight  the  same  memories  of  prac- 
tice and  sight  which  he  has.^ 

1  This  was  part  of  a  lesson  noted  by  a  pupil. 

We  have  considered  the  technical  sides  of  art  as  merely  the  means 
of  expression.  We  have  noticed,  however,  that  these  means  —  this 
dress  in  which  the  idea  is  presented  to  us  —  are  only,  in  part,  the 
result  of  the  feelings  and  perceptions  of  the  artist :  that  he  begins  at 
first  by  accumulating  memories  that  properly  are  not  his  own ;  that  are 
the  memories  of  his  ancestry,  of  his  first  predilections,  and  most 
decidedly  of  his  first  training.  Later  on  —  we  must  always  remember 
that  time  is  of  no  consequence,  and  that  these  words  may  represent  a 
very  brief  interval  or  a  very  long  one  —  the  artist  introduces  into 
what  he  does  his  own  development  of  personal  memories.  He  may, 
then,  come  to  a  prodigious  difBculty,  the  explanation  of  which  diffi- 
culty will  give  us  the  clue  of  certain  mistakes  which  are  not  infrequent 
in  the  work  of  art,  and  which  especially  control  its  appearance  to-day. 
We  can  suppose  the  artist  passing  out  of  his  childhood  of  art,  out  of 
the  pleasant  expanse  of  certain  methods  and  a  liking  for  the  manner 
of  looking  at  the  world  embodied  in  these  methods.  He  has  become 
a  graver  person.     He  has  strong  feelings  that  become  more  and  more 


136  LECTURE  IV 

And  if  these  objections  to  sincere  expression, 
perfectly  natural,  as  I  said,  belong  to  a  narrow 
mind,  if  indeed  all  this  is  but  another  statement 
of  all  that  I  have  been  noting,  either  combined 
with  strict  views,  or  joined  to  a  tortuous  nature, 

the  main  ones  in  that  part  of  his  life  that  he  desires  to  express.  Or 
else  he  may  always  have  had  such  graver  or  higher  or  more  noble 
sides,  which  have  remained  dormant  during  the  apprenticeship  to  the 
external ;  and  he  may  revert  to  these  fundamental  loves  of  early  life. 
Suppose,  for  instance,  that  all  that  turn  towards  the  interior  world 
which  we  call  religion,  should  awake  in  him  or  come  back  to  him  from 
the  time  when  he  lived  contented,  breathing  the  atmosphere  of  feeling, 
out  of  which  he  had  passed  insensibly,  into  the  dryer  and  more  confined 
air  of  the  average  aesthetic  life.  For  you  must  not  think  that  the 
average  aesthetic  manner  of  life  is  so  much  richer  than  any  other.  A 
Bohemian  may  be  a  chump  like  any  other  fellow.  Nor  does  the  love 
of  the  ornamental  dado  or  of  "art  colours"  necessarily  expand  the 
mind.  During  those  years  of  apprenticeship,  the  external  body  of  his 
art  will  have  been  made  by  something  like  crystallization.  He  will 
have  accepted  methods  that  belonged  to  men  of  other  ways  of  feeling 
—  methods  never  used  to  express  any  depth  of  thought  or  emotion, 
meant  perhaps  as  an  indication  of  there  being  really  nothing  more  in 
the  world  than  the  momentary  pleasant  perceptions  through  which  we 
pass  without  looking  beneath,  or  without  any  interior  questioning. 
What  will  the  artist  do  ?  His  language,  its  cadences,  its  colouring, 
every  part  of  it,  will  have  been  meant  to  state  something  almost  the 
reverse  of  what  he  really  now  feels  most.  His  methods  do  not  imply 
respect ;  he  has  learned  to  express  himself  only  in  accents  of  lightness 
or  triviality,  and  he  knows  no  others.  He  can  no  longer  sing  in 
any  other  tones  than  those  to  which  he  has  trained  his  voice.  What 
shall  he  do  f 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OP  MEANING  137 

we  shall  see  here,  in  a  sort  of  natural  history  of 
man,  part  of  the  causes  of  opposition  to  artists 
whose  career  has  been  a  free  one,  open  to  na- 
ture's grace  and  influence  as  the  earth  they  love 
is  to  the  showers  and  the  sun. 

If  he  is  a  very  great  man,  —  I  mean,  rather,  a  great  personality  like 
Millet,  for  instance,  —  he  will  live  in  a  struggle  with  the  methods  that 
he  uses.  There  may  occasionally  be  such  successful  cases,  which  prove 
—  to  what  should  be  our  great  satisfaction  —  that  the  human  mind 
cannot  be  classified  like  the  forms  of  the  lower  ranges  of  animal  life. 

But  all  the  probabilities  of  life  are  against  the  man  whom  I  have 
tried  to  bring  up  before  you.  His  means  will  contradict  his  end.  We 
shall  then  feel  curiosity,  interest  —  anything  that  you  may  like  to  name 
except  the  main  thing,  and  that  is  that  he  has  expressed  himself. 

This  difficulty  will  not  be  recognized  easily  by  himself.  He  will 
wonder  why  people  do  not  take  him  seriously.  He  will  wonder  why 
his  work  is  always  treated  as  a  remarkable  piece  of  technique  ;  while 
he  has  perhaps  often  hoped  that  it  might  preach  something,  that  it 
might  at  least  give  testimony  or  recognize  some  lesson  of  doctrine. 
As  you  will  remember,  when  we  explained  to  ourselves  how  limited 
our  range  of  vision  was,  we  saw  how  difficult  it  was  to  free  ourselves 
from  our  memories  of  sight ;  we  can  thus  appreciate  how  the  artist's 
memories  will  call  up  no  other  memories  of  sight,  in  such  a  case,  but 
those  connected  with  the  expression  of  ideas  which  he  does  not  now 
care  for ;  and  since  he  is  always  sure  that  he  is  himself,  it  will  become 
almost  impossible  for  him  to  go  against  these  memories,  gauge  them 
as  they  are,  and  put  them  behind  him.  He  would  have  to  be  bom- 
again. 

This,  I  think,  will  explain  the  feeling  that  we  have  to-day,  of  so 
much  in  the  art  of  painting  or  of  sculpture — not  to  mention  the 
others  —  which  makes  us  doubt  the  existence  of  strong  feeling  and 


188  LECTURE  IV 

Add  to  this  the  temptations  of  life :  the  fierce 
desire  for  success  and  selling  one's  wares ;  the 
necessity  of  banding  together,  and  thereby  keep- 
ing others  out  —  all  the  things  that  excuse  what 
we  do  collectively  that  is  wrong  in  the  individ- 
ual ;  —  and  the  reasons  for  not  admitting  as 
plausible  the  illusions  of  others,  become  clearer, 
and  however  to  be  regretted,  less  unnatural. 

desire  in  the  artists  whose  works  are  meant  to  appeal  to  some  of  our 
feelings.  We  can  see  why,  in  certain  German  painters,  for  instance, 
the  method  of  painting  invented  and  developed  for  the  representation 
of  barnyard  scenes,  of  comic  situations  in  peasant^life,  for  the  tawdry 
imitation  of  silks  and  satins  and  theatrical  show,  is  anomalous  —  I 
might  say  unthinkable,  when  it  is  applied  to  the  Divine  tragedy  of 
the  life  of  Christ,  or  to  carry  the  plaint  of  the  exiled  sons  of  Eve. 

I  have  taken  the  German  painter  as  a  better  instance,  because  of 
a  certain  lower  level  of  art  developed  in  Germany,  which  allows  us  to 
see  more  distinctly,  by  not  calling  upon  us  to  judge  the  exceptional. 
The  same  analysis  would,  however,  distinctly  apply  to  the  methods 
of  the  French  artists,  learned  in  the  studios  of  the  Beaux-Arts  ;  where 
the  point  has  been  to  make  a  good  study  of  the  model,  with  or  with- 
out drapery,  in  such  a  way  as  to  avoid  getting  into  any  diflBcultiea, 
and  to  keep  entirely  within  the  range  of  the  academic  —  a  range  less 
annoying,  perhaps,  than  the  vulgar,  because  it  appeals  to  us  as  people 
of  society,  but  just  as  preposterous  in  the  representation  of  the  ideal. 

Or  again,  the  methods  used  for  what  is  called  decoration,  for  the 
covering  of  surfaces  of  walls,  or  stained  glass,  or  any  kind  of  furni- 
ture of  a  more  {esthetic  pretension  —  all  of  which  methods,  in  the 
usual  way,  are  meant  to  escape  work,  to  ease  the  mind  from  inquiry, 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  139 

Besides,  it  is  inevitable  that  on  one  side  the 
painter  —  the  artist  —  will  be  narrow;  I  had 
almost  said  must  be  narrow.  He  has  to  act ; 
he  has  to  choose  here  and  now;  he  cannot 
travel  on  two  paths  at  once.  For  the  moments 
in  which  he  brings  his  idea  into  the  real  world 

from  emotion ;  to  bring  back  things  to  the  intellectual  value  of  the 
average  carpet.  These  methods  cannot  be  informed  at  once  by  any 
passion  which  will  take  them  away  from  the  irresponsibility  of  the 
furniture  which  they  match.  So  that  the  question  put  to  me  by  the 
Philadelphia  lady,  as  to  which  of  the  decorative  firms  had  the  most 
religious  feeling,  seems  preposterous. 

It  is  true  that  sometimes  these  methods  do  not  annoy  us  so  much, 
partly  for  this  very  reason,  that  they  are  so  inadequate  that  we  do 
not  hear  any  voice ;  partly  because,  as  the  methods  of  decorative  art 
are  of  necessity  connected  with  the  past,  and  with  the  firmest  founda- 
tions of  the  pictorial  art,  there  is  something  which  at  least  on  that 
one  side  may  seem  to  connect  with  what  we  know  has  been  a  part  of 
certain  great  expressions  in  the  past :  as  the  use  to-day  of  gold  in  a 
background,  or  of  a  line  of  gold  for  the  halo  around  a  saint's  head, 
reminds  us  that  once  upon  a  time,  there  were  artists  whose  works 
represent  all  the  religious  feeling  of  the  ages,  and  that  these  artists 
used  gold  in  their  backgrounds,  and  gold  in  the  halos  of  their  saints. 

First,  therefore,  see  that  your  methods  are  respectful.  Never  make 
light  of  difficulties  or  slip  easily  over  what  you  find  to  be  obstacles. 
Better  be  gawky  than  flippant  in  your  work.  Imitate  in  your  methods 
the  methods  of  religious  life,  even  if  they  oblige  you  to  the  lengthiest 
preparations.  And  if  a  passionate  impulse  carries  you  away,  your 
expression  will  still  have  the  accent  that  comes  of  previous  respectful 
meditation. 


140  LECTURE  r7 

of  mechanics,  what  he  has  to  do  is  all  that  he 
can  manage.  It  cannot  be  done  too  thoroughly, 
too  singly.  He  is  like  the  general,  the  com- 
mander in  the  field :  the  battle  has  to  be  won ; 
what  side  issues  can  there  be  ?  The  riders  tram- 
ple down  their  own  companions  who  have  fallen ; 
the  cannon  wheels  crush  out  friend  and  foe. 

From  this  habit  of  mind  alone,  the  artist,  on 
the  side  that  he  has  in  common  with  men  of 
action,  may  well  retain  that  attitude  which 
marks  the  soldier  in  a  cause. 

"A  quoi  pensez-vous ? "  (What  do  you  think 
of  all  this?)  said  Fromentin  the  painter,  to  his 
friend  the  officer,  who  was  holding,  almost  by 
mere  force  of  will,  some  little  far-off  post  in  the 
desert,  just  conquered. 

" My  friend,"  the  officer  answered,  "if  I 
thought  of  all  this,  I  should  become  too  much 
of  a  philosopher  for  a  soldier." 

So  also,  the  artist  usually  closes  his  mind  to 
argument ;  wisely  enough,  the  combination  of  his 
instincts  reminds  him  —  convinces  him  of  a  fact : 
that  his  opponent's   being  able   to  argue   better 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  141 

than  he  does,  does  not  prove  his  opponent  to 
be  in  the  right ;  it  only  proves  that  his  opponent 
is  stronger  in  argument.  As  to  himself,  he  must 
be  persuaded  besides  being  convinced.  And  he 
cannot,  without  loss  to  his  power  of  grasp  by 
what  we  call  instinct,  —  or  what  I  have  tried  to 
state  is  a  form  of  genius,  —  accustom  himself  to 
go  step  by  step,  at  the  pace  of  the  logicians.  So 
that  he  is  obstinate,  and  a  dreamer,  like  many 
men  of  action;  and,  like  them,  not  so  different 
from  women. 

And  his  moral  nature  having  to  be  soothed 
by  a  sense  of  justice,  he  attributes  to  those 
who  give  other  impressions  than  his,  who  build 
another  kind  of  bridge,  some  form  of  moral 
obliquity.  A  well-known  French  painter  repeats 
that  if  Millet  were  alive  and  he  could  again  keep 
him  from  the  Salon,  he  would  do  so,  on  account 
of  his  deteriorating  influence.  Ingres  says  of 
Delacroix,  who  yet  had  defended  him  as  an 
artist,  when  Ingres  was  still  misunderstood,  "  Ne 
me  parlez  pas  de  cet  homme  la."  (Don't  mention 
that  man  to   me.)     One   sees  the  same  sort  of 


142  LECTURE  IV 

thing  in  the  white  men  who  hold  some  post  in 
far-away  lands,  among  what  they  call  natives. 
Were  they  all  to  understand  them,  with  sympa- 
thy, the  grasp  of  the  conqueror  might  be  loosened. 
It  is  the  power,  the  awful  power  for  the  moment, 
of  ignorance. 

Much  of  this  is  the  result  of  knowledge  crys- 
tallized too  rapidly.  But  knowledge  is  simply 
a  filling  of  part  of  the  great  void  of  ignorance. 
The  beginner,  the  youngster,  out  of  school  or 
still  in  it,  has  of  course  memories  that  are 
fewer;  the  first  associations  of  some  manner  of 
liking  with  the  thing  seen.  How  can  he  help 
seeing  little  else  than  his  methods  just  learned, 
and  with  the  faithfulness  and  "solidarity"  of  the 
boy,  look  for  these  only  —  "the  kind  of  thing 
the  other  fellows  are  after."  Indeed,  he  hardly 
recognizes  anything  in  nature  that  is  newer  than 
his  own  records,  unless  some  one  has  "  done  it," 
who  himself  has  some  actual  connection  with  him, 
and  over  whose  method  of  work  he  can  walk  as 
on  a  bridge,  to  this  new  land  of  representation. 

He  may  so  crystallize   his   memories  that  all 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  143 

else  is  closed,  and  he  drops  out  of  the  list,  at 
length ;  or  he  may  go  the  furthest  length  of  his 
classmates,  and  walk  as  far  as  they. 

As  small  or  great  will  be  the  same  to  him,  he 
may  do  as  David's  pupils  used  to  do;  throw 
things  at  certain  pictures,  say  the  famous  Wat- 
teaux,  and  object  physically.  It  is  not  that  he 
sees  the  other  thing  and  objects.  He  does  not 
see  it  at  all.  I  have  known  an  intelligent  young 
painter  burst  out  with  laughter  at  the  painting 
of  a  great  Delacroix,  not  one  square  inch  of 
which  he  could  have  paralleled  as  mere  brush 
work,  in  a  thousand  years  of  continuous  effort; 
and  then  go  and  admire  voluptuously  the  surface 
of  one  of  the  smaller  French  painters  of  to-day 
—  the  name  doesn't  matter  —  a  surface  he  could 
parallel  and  reproduce  fairly ;  —  all  but  the  in- 
vention connected  with  it,  and  that  freedom  of 
brush  which  sometimes  seems  to  mean  :  I  have 
learned  this  way,  but  I  might  have  learned 
another,  for  I  am  a  good  executant. 

Like  Narcissus,  and  as  fatally,  he  was  admir- 
ing his  capacities  reflected  in  the  smooth  mirror 


144  LECTURE  IV 

of  a  painter,  as  a  mirror  undisturbed  by  any 
motion,  any  waves  of  tbe  great  wind  that  blows 
through  the  world  from  higher  spaces.  Prob- 
ably by  this  time  the  water  nymphs  below  have 
dragged  him  down. 

Again  we  return  to  this  —  that  we  see  in  the 
work  of  art  what  we  wish  to  see:  the  picture 
of  our  own  memories  of  sight;  the  mirror  of 
what  we  are  or  have  grown. 

Now  if  in  the  artist  (on  his  poorer  side) 
we  have  analyzed  his  resistance  to  impressions 
offered  to  him,  at  the  same  time  with  others 
that  he  dislikes,  or  objects  to,  or  does  not  under- 
stand, what  must  not  be  the  obstacles  in  the 
way  of  people  with  still  less  sensitiveness  of 
organization?  Not  that  all  artists  are  more  sen- 
sitive to  art  than  those  who  are  not  artists. 
Remember  that  what  decides  the  career  of  a 
painter  is  the  curious  relation  between  the  eye 
and  the  hand  —  the  desire  and  power  of  making 
a  movement  with  the  hand,  to  repeat  and  recall 
the  memories  of  the  brain. 

Do  not  let  us  confuse  things. 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  145 

A  writer  to  the  savage  is  a  man  who  writes; 
a  painter  is  a  man  who  paints.  To  the  savage, 
any  man  who  can  make,  as  we  all  do,  marks 
which  can  be  interpreted  into  sentences,  is  a 
writer.  Difficult  it  is  to  gauge  whether  he  can 
understand  what  gradations  we  see  involved  in 
the  word.  To  the  savage  of  savagery,  to  the 
savage  of  civilization,  any  man  is  a  painter  who, 
making  marks  with  paints,  can  have  them  inter- 
preted into  the  meaning  of  things. 

But  we  are  obliged  to  supply,  by  the  use  of 
the  name  of  artist,  the  deficiency  in  classification. 
The  artist  is  he  who,  as  I  said  when  I  defined 
art  again,  effects  an  intellectual  connection  with 
nature  outside  him;  has  accumulated  memories 
of  sight  rarer  than  the  common,  and  memories 
of  their  connections ;  and  is  open  to  new  memo- 
ries placed  so  suddenly  with  older  ones  that  they 
look  like  first  apprehensions  and  reachings-out. 

But  what  appeal  can  there  be  to  the  man  who 
has  few  memories  of  sight  that  are  personal,  few 
acquired  through  works  of  art? 

Museums,   collections    of    various    kinds  —  the 


146  LECTURE  IV 

looking  at  nature  with  the  feeling  that  it  can  be 
rendered ;  the  enjoyment  of  nature  on  account  of 
art,  and  of  art  on  account  of  nature ;  all  this  will 
tend  to  make  a  collection  of  memories  and  encour- 
age the  confidence  in  them,  and  prevent  their 
being  lost  or  displaced.  For  the  child  has  often 
begun  to  collect  impressions,  and  yet  after  a  time 
loses  those  first  memories  of  the  pleasures  of  sight, 
as  other  memories  of  other  things  displace  the  less 
reasoned,  less  analyzed  early  impressions. 

We  can  end  by  seeing  how,  still  more  than  with 
the  artists,  the  great  public  recognize  slowly  any 
new  addition  to  the  wealth  of  the  world  in  the 
records  of  things  seen,  in  the  works  of  art  that 
imply  such  records,  be  they  of  painting,  of  sculpt- 
ure, or  of  the  smaller  arts  of  decoration,  and 
finally  why  the  mediocre  and  the  plausible  must 
always  reign  for  a  time. 

Were  we  to  look  about  any  museum,  —  were  we 
to  look  about  this  one,  —  we  should  surely  see 
waifs,  fragments  of  work  stranded  on  the  shore, 
if  I  may  say  so,  —  bits  of  old  shipwrecks ;  but 
which,  at  one  time,  were  carried  over  seas,  buoy- 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  147 

ant  and  inflated  with  the  wind  of  popular  favour. 
Museums,  alas !  are  like  all  great  institutions  — 
not  merely  ideal;  they  give  examples  of  what 
should  be  avoided,  of  what  ultimately  is  avoided ; 
but  which  for  a  moment  confuses  the  mind  of  the 
young,  and  impresses  memories  upon  them,  that 
may  return  to  do  them  harm  —  at  least  automat- 
ically. 

It  is  always  impossible  to  explain  how  such 
things  have  happened  to  be  included.  Perhaps 
they  have  not  happened  here  by  themselves, — 
they  are  parts  and  fragments  of  circumstances 
not  so  painful.  To  obtain  and  enjoy  means  for 
greater  purchases,  we  are  willing  to  accept  gifts 
that  we  ought  to  decline;  we  yield  to  personal 
considerations.  Have  I  not  recommended  per- 
sons and  paintings  myself,  rather  than  claim 
authority,  —  rather  than  dishearten  in  the  pub- 
lic an  interest  which  has  to  be  fanned  like  a  small 
ember  about  to  go  out  ? 

These  examples  represent  an  average  perception 
and  reflect  average  personal  likings  of  a  moment ; 
but  as  soon  as  something  more  has  been  acquired 


148  LECTURE  IV 

and  expressed,  then  we  see  all  there  is  in  them,  and 
are  shocked  at  coming  to  the  end  of  a  world ; 
since  it  must  then  be  unlike  the  real  one  which  it 
represents ;  for  the  real  one  has  always  more  to 
give  to  our  inquiry  or  appreciation.  And  yet 
even  there,  with  certain  minds  (so  true  is  the  defi- 
nition that  we  make  the  value  of  the  work  of  art), 
we  shall  detect  their  delight  in  feeling  assured 
that  there  is  nothing  more,  that  they  know  every 
bit  of  it,  and  can  name  all  that  is  there. 

Offensive  to  them  must  be  the  work  of  art,  the 
man,  the  kind  of  view  of  any  truth,  which  cannot 
easily  be  held  in  a  short  formula,  which  has  any 
impression  of  superiority  —  and  escapes  their 
grasp. 

Some  of  us  dislike,  some  of  us  fear,  all  of  us  are 
at  least  chary,  of  what  cannot  as  yet  be  cata- 
logued and  stamped  with  a  trade-mark. 

Balzac  had  a  motto :  "  Comprendre  c'est  par- 
donner " ;  and,  to  a  certain  extent,  I  hope  that 
this  analysis  of  the  reasons  for  dissenting  from 
admiration  and  enjoyment  of  certain  work?  of 
art,  will  make  you,  my  students,  pause  a  moment 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  149 

before  resenting.  Patience  —  long-suffering,  has 
always  been  the  badge  of  those  really  favoured  by 
Minerva ;  and  one  of  the  earliest  of  great  artists 
in  words  has  shown  what  she  did  for  Ulysses; 
and  how  she  brought  him  home  at  last,  and  placed 
him  on  the  throne  that  belonged  to  him. 

We  may  also — we  students — as  pupils  together 
(for  Michael  Angelo,  you  know,  went  to  school,  as 
he  called  it,  when  he  was  so  old  that  he  could  not 
see,  but  had  to  handle  the  famous  ancient  torso  he 
cared  for,  which  goes  by  his  name),  we  may  learn 
also  that  we  can  admire  what  is  greater  than  our- 
selves, without  thereby  personally  caring  for  it  as 
much  as  for  something  nearer  fitted  to  us.  There 
is  nothing  to  be  ashamed  of  in  such  a  choice. 
And  if  we  see  the  result  of  meanness,  of  vanity, 
of  envy,  of  all  the  hard  sides  of  man,  in  his  con- 
sideration of  works  of  art,  so  we  must  beware  of 
the  loss  of  our  mental  dignity  in  yielding  to  our 
weaker  and  more  amiable  side;  the  caring  only 
for  some  personal  liking,  and  our  coming  in  that 
way  to  what  is  injustice. 

Therein   again,   personal   memories  of   likings, 


160  LECTURE  IV 

memories  that  fit  our  inmost  nature,  would  be 
allowed  to  take  precedence  of  those  records  of 
memory  which  establish  greater  choices;  which 
we  feel  obscurely  belong  to  characters  more 
highly  strung  than  ours  —  to  beings  breathing  in 
a  higher  air,  more  difficult  to  live  in  —  rarer. 

But  why  should  we  not  be  as  well  pleased  to 
recognize  the  fact;  why  object  to  what  is  great 
and  splendid  and  lofty  and  immortal,  because  we 
cannot  use  it  in  our  every-day  life  of  common, 
though  happy,  moments  ?  Does  it  hurt  me  that 
Michael  Angelo  was  greater  and  is  greater,  while 
Carpaccio  and  Cima  are  sweet  to  me,  and  my 
mind  makes  no  effort  to  comprehend  them,  but 
is  simply  soothed,  as  by  simple  melodies? 

Nor  is  the  limit  what  we  can  do  ourselves, 
how  far  we  can  leap.  Have  we  not,  perhaps, 
limited  ourselves;  and  if  not,  can  we  alter  the 
fact  by  taking  thought? 

We  must  not  be  bound  by  what  we  can  do,  or 
what  is  most  akin  to  what  we  can  do.  And 
even  from  what  is  furthest  away  from  us  in  art, 
we  may  some  day  draw  the  feeling  for  something 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  161 

to  add  to  our  powers.  Or  we  may  see  in  methods 
that  are  not  just  our  own  some  fault  that  helps 
us  to  an  expression  of  an  almost  contrary  feeling. 
Much,  for  instance,  of  Delacroix's  power  of  ex- 
pressing melancholy  and  romantic  feeling  comes 
from  his  having  admired,  even  against  his  will, 
what  may  be  called  the  robustious  healthiness  of 
Rubens,  and  from  having  actually  studied  out  the 
Fleming's  material  means,  which  seem  usually 
so  joyous  and  so  unfitted  for  the  Byronic,  new 
anxieties  of  this  century,  distracted  by  the  loss 
of  old  faiths,  disturbed  by  the  apparition  of  new 
necessities  of  inquiry. 

"Ses  couleurs  crues,  ses  grosses  formes," — Ru- 
bens' unbroken  colours,  his  coarse  forms,  annoyed 
Delacroix,  but  with  them  he  felt  the  wisdom  of 
the  Fleming  and  his  determination  to  use  any 
means  for  an  end.  "Get  homme  ne  se  refuse' 
rien,"  Delacroix  says. 

And  the  great  example  of  Rubens  conveyed  to 
him  the  idea  of  a  real  unity,  the  presence  of  a 
great  life  which  should  animate  and  sustain  both 
faults  and  qualities. 


162  LECTURE  IV 

For  remember  again  (as  we  saw  last  week) 
that  the  wish  and  the  decision  to  be  mterested 
especially  in  the  life  and  movement  of  nature, 
implies  another  point  of  view,  as  well  as  another 
method  of  treatment,  from  that  which  would 
represent  pleasure  in  the  quiet,  the  steadi- 
ness and  the  peace  of  external  sights.  From 
each  view  and  interest  a  different  manner  must 
result. 

A  man  giving  even  what  all  expect,  some- 
times goes  very  far  beyond,  and  his  own  record 
of  memories  will  only  be  understood  as  other 
people's  memories  accumulate.  He  will  be  a 
constant  reminder  of  there  being  something  more. 
Little  by  little,  other  recorders  will  make  notes 
that  will  sustain  and  justify  his;  his  necessary 
deficiencies,  his  necessary  exaggerations,  will  no 
longer  surprise.  We  shall  pass  over  his  bridge 
to  a  new  land,  and  thank  him  whom  we  doubted 
at  first.  It  may  take  a  long  time ;  other  roads 
may  have  been  travelled  meanwhile,  by  other  ex- 
plorers whom  we  notice  and  whose  memories 
we  enjoy  j    so  that  Donatello  may    come    fresh 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OF  MEANING  153 

to  US  after  several  centuries.  The  Rerabrandts, 
which  we  recognize  as  so  mighty  to-day,  whose 
possession  represents  so  much  money,  were  to  be 
had,  even  when  his  name  and  fame  was  known, 
for  less  than  you,  my  pupils,  would  accept  to-day 
for  any  study  of  yours. 

Millet  required  some  twenty  years  or  more  to 
be  fairly  sure  of  the  Salon ;  while  you,  young  ladies 
and  gentlemen,  if  you  go  to  Julian's  Academy  in 
Paris  for  a  little  while,  and  are  fairly  polite,  are 
pretty  sure  of  being  accepted  where  Delacroix 
was  rejected.  Perhaps,  then,  if  you  have  to  wait 
awhile  for  a  real  recognition,  you  will  be  patient. 
If  it  comes  later,  in  a  few  more  years,  you  can  be 
humble  when  you  think  of  such  names  as  those 
I  have  mentioned. 

By  asking  you  to  join  me  in  the  calm  consider- 
ation of  the  causes  that  lead  to  misapprehension 
of  what  the  artist  has  meant  —  of  what  he  has 
really  said  —  and  of  his  slow  acceptance  by  us, 
the  world,  I  have  invited  you  —  you  who  are 
students  with  me  (though  I  am  named  the 
leader)  —  to  look  down  in  peace  upon  the  battle  of 


164  LECTURE  IV 

the  world  of  art,  in  which,  at  another  moment, 
some  of  us  will  be  combatants. 

As  in  all  contemplation,  you  are  placed  above 
the  field  of  strife. 

Do  not  think  that  you  cannot  hold,  for  a  mo- 
ment at  least,  such  a  place  —  that  you  have  of 
your  profession  a  less  high  view  and  less  respect. 
In  any  museum,  worthy  of  the  name  in  the 
least,  you  cannot  feel  so. 

It  is  your  ancestral  palace ;  of  whose  great 
inhabitants  you  are  to  become  worthy.  The 
greatest  of  reputations  belong  to  your  family, — 
the  family  ready  to  adopt  you.  You  too  may 
become  heads  of  great  houses,  and  chiefs  of  clans, 
as  your  kinsmen  have  been.  At  least,  in  some 
branch  you  will  establish  your  claim  to  continue 
the  race  —  to  continue  their  pursuit;  to  make 
also  a  representation  of  the  world  by  yourselves. 

If  there  be  a  place  which  is  yours,  it  is  this, 
in  which  there  is  no  lower  position  except  by  gra- 
dation of  service ;  where  rivalry  means  something 
more  than  opposition  and  triumph  over  others. 
For  as  one  of  us  once  said  (my  old  companion  in 


MISAPPREHENSIONS  OP  MEANING  165 

art,  Elihu  Vedder) :  "  It  is  not  with  others  we 
are  struggling,  as  the  public  think,  —  it  is  with 
ourselves." 

And  Thackeray,  who  was  with  us  for  a  time, 
as  a  soldier,  and  who  left  us  for  triumphs  in 
another  art,  says :  "  The  humblest  volunteer  in 
the  ranks  of  art,  who  has  served  a  campaign  or 
two  ever  so  ingloriously,  has  at  least  this  good 
fortune  of  understanding,  or  fancying  he  is  able 
to  understand,  how  the  battle  has  been  fought, 
and  how  the  engaged  general  won  it.'* 


LECTURE  V 

MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS 


SYNOPSIS  OF  LECTURE  V 

The  museum  a  modem  make-shift.  —  Older  methods  of  teaching 
art.  —  The  Museum  and  the  Academy. — The  lesser  arts. — The  work 
of  art  that  we  call  decoration.  —  Its  insufficiency  to-day.  —  Its  fulness 
formerly.  —  Colour  and  composition. — Consideration  of  how  we  see 
through  the  impression  of  colour.  —  What  we  see  is  translated  to  us  by 
some  effect  of  coloured  light,  and  that  effect  is  placed  within  laws  of 
arrangement  which  sometimes  we  call  perspective  and  sometimes 
composition.  — Painting  and  the  painter  of  to-day.  —  References  to  the 
difficulties  through  which  we  see.  —  The  illusions  and  inaccuracies  of 
our  senses.  —  Partial  review  of  artistic  vision.  —  The  sight  of  the 
moment  a  theme  upon  which  we  embroider  former  memories,  habits 
and  images.  — The  illusions  which  we  recognize,  which  prevent  our 
giving  to  ourselves  an  accurate  accimnt  of  certain  qualities  of  the  tilings 
that  we  look  at,  can  be  used  In  turn  In  the  Illusion  of  the  work  of  art. 
—  The  impression  of  sight  connected  with  the  Impression  of  the  hand. 
Hence  the  touch  can  designate  the  mind  of  the  painter.  —  Time  in 
execution  of  the  work  of  art  not  a  measurable  quantity.  —  The  exe- 
cution of  the  work  of  art  Implies  the  joining  together  of  former 
memories  to  the  perceptions  of  the  moment.  Hence  the  necessity  of 
constant  purification  of  our  memories.  Hence  the  use  not  only  of  our 
own,  but  of  the  memories  of  others. 


LECTURE  V 

MAIA,    OE   ILLUSIONS 

The  museum,  then,  is  the  storehouse  which 
holds  the  records  of  your  ancestors.  It  would  be 
better  if  in  the  monument  of  family  history  only 
the  memories  were  kept  of  those  who  have  done 
honour  to  our  long  struggle ;  and  that  we  should 
not  have  any  reminder  of  those  who  have  disgraced 
us.  For  them  the  empty  space  should  be  enough, 
—  like  the  place  held  in  the  walls  of  Venice  for 
the  record  of  Marino  Faliero,  Decapitatus  pro 
criminihus.  But  the  further  that  we  go  back,  the 
more  our  streams  of  descent  seem  clear.  Time, 
as  I  showed  to  you  before,  having  disposed  of 
many  questions,  it  is  only  with  the  more  recent 
examples  that  we  can  become  confused.  The 
analogy  to  all  records  of  ancestry  is  therefore 
quite  complete.     The  museum,  as  you  know,  is  a 

159 


160  LECTURE  V 

modern  institution.  It  is  admirable  in  one  sense ; 
in  another,  that  which  it  replaces  was  better  for 
the  life  of  art  than  what  it  gives  to-day.  If  it 
were  not  so,  this  age  of  museums,  of  collections 
of  general  interest  in  art,  of  written  teaching,  of 
oral  explanations,  of  academies,  of  government 
and  municipal  schools,  should  have  given  us  the 
largest  and  richest  development  of  art  which  the 
world  has  ever  seen. 

However  much  the  present  century  has  seen 
done,  either  in  the  logical  development  of  art, 
by  the  development  of  the  things  implied  in  the 
memories  of  older  artists,  or  by  the  triumphant 
record  of  certain  men,  who  here  and  there,  usu- 
ally in  an  unforeseen  manner,  have  come  to 
bloom,  and  have  added  their  stock  of  memories 
and  their  impressions  to  what  we  had  before  — 
no  one,  I  believe,  will  consider  the  statement  at 
all  out  of  the  commonplace,  that  the  past  cen- 
turies, without  museums  and  without  academic 
organization  like  ours,  have  given  us,  not  only 
together,  but  often  separately,  proofs  of  stronger 
life,  of   greater  technical  realization  in  our  arts. 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  161 

The  change  was  inevitable,  and  in  certain  ways 
we  shall  have  to  accept  it  for  an  indefinite  future. 
With  time  we  shall  readjust  ourselves;  we  shall 
develop  better  the  methods  imposed  upon  us ;  it 
may  be  that  we  shall  make  still  stronger  what 
remains  we  have  of  the  methods  of  instruction 
that  belong  to  the  past. 

Even  the  destruction  now  forced  by  what  is 
called  commerce,  upon  all  those  branches  of  art, 
which,  being  worked  collectively,  by  many  people 
together  of  different  grades,  are  specially  liable 
to  disturbance  which  no  individual  devotion,  no 
individual  high-mindedness  can  check;  which 
also  being  mechanism,  can  be  made  into  organi- 
zations entirely  ruled  by  the  commercial  spirit  — 
even  these  injuries,  these  degradations,  may  have 
an  end,  when  again  it  may  become  the  interest  of 
what  is  called  commerce  to  thrive  by  the  rivalry 
of  doing  well. 

No  doubt  that  with  each  year  the  guardians  of 
such  vast  intellectual  property  as  we  detain  in 
museums  will  feel  more  and  more  the  responsi- 
bility entrusted  to  them,  and  will  aid  by  many 


162  LECTURE  V 

means  to  diffuse  their  knowledge,  to  appreciate 
the  manner  of  their  production ;  and  as  the  posi- 
tion becomes  more  and  more  a  part  of  high  edu- 
cational service,  men  of  learning,  men  of  inquiry, 
will  more  and  more  be  chosen  to  make,  by  their 
aiding  efforts,  common  intellectual  property  of  this 
accumulation. 

The  breaking  up  of  the  old  world  destroyed  the 
ancient  system  in  which  the  student  of  art  entered 
by  the  gate  of  the  workman  —  "played  in  the 
gate  of  the  Master,"  as  the  Japanese  called  study. 
He  was  a  child  and  treated  as  a  child,  and  things 
were  done  for  him  or  not,  as  might  be  good  for 
him  in  the  opinion  of  his  betters.  Meanwhile  he 
served  them.  He  learned  to  become  a  tool,  —  first 
the  tool  of  his  master  and  then  his  own.  All  in- 
struction went  directly  with  practice, — I  do  not 
mean  the  mere  practice  of  using  the  hand  as  we 
artists  use  it,  but  the  immediate  use  of  that  skill 
acquired,  —  for  work  which  had  its  place  already 
assigned.  No  detail,  therefore,  was  slurred ;  and 
in  an  art  so  humble  on  the  side  of  its  execution,  so 
dependent  upon  materials,  there  was  an  unbroken 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  163 

chain  between  the  greatest  painter  and  the  man 
who  ground  his  colours.  I  think  it  is  again 
Francis  of  Holland  who  speaks  of  having  met 
Michael  Angelo  out  on  his  walk,  with  his  old 
friend  and  colour-grinder,  —  a  man  to  whose 
memory  he  wrote  lines  as  full  of  devotion  as 
the  great  sonnets  inspired  by  what  we  call 
his  love  for  Vittoria  Colonna.  Those  relations 
still  subsist  in  cej'tain  countries,  as  they  do  in 
Japan ;  and  this  making  one  family  of  the 
greater  artist  and  all  who  have  to  do  with  him 
has  given  that  peculiar  completeness,  that  sense 
of  peace  and  absence  of  struggle  which  we  feel 
in  Japanese  art,  from  the  painting  of  the  draw- 
ings to  the  workmanship  of  their  lacquers  and 
their  medals. 

In  those  smaller  divisions  of  work  in  art, 
which  I  referred  to  when  I  spoke  of  work  done 
in  community,  we  shall  probably  see  for  us  some 
return  of  the  past.  But  the  day  of  such  a  nat- 
ural manner  of  life  may  be  far  off.  For  our 
art  of  painting,  the  nearest  approach  to  it  to-day 
is  still  in  the  schools;   but  the  hold  there  is  a 


164  LECTURE  V 

precarious  one,  and  the  connection  between  the 
greater  and  smaller  is  interrupted  and  dependent 
upon  something  else  than  the  necessary  progress 
from  first  knowledge  to  full  development. 

In  the  older  days  the  master  might  show  his 
pupils  what  had  been  done  before  them  by  others 
than  himself,  in  separate  examples,  with  each  of 
which  would  go  a  form  of  teaching  all  the  more 
influential  from  its  not  beipg  academic.  The 
impression  on  the  younger  painter's  mind  of  the 
great  works  hung  in  churches,  seen  one  by  one, 
their  colours,  their  forms  distinctly  fitted  to  the 
place  for  which  they  were  meant,  their  meaning 
emphasized  by  the  circumstances  of  the  place, 
by  the  importance  attached  to  the  use  for  which 
these  works  of  art  were  meant,  must  have  been 
far  stronger,  from  its  unity,  its  singleness,  than 
that  which  students  can  get  to-day  from  these 
very  same  works,  confused  upon  the  walls  of  a 
building  like  a  museum,  not  built  to  hold  them 
more  than  others;  where  light  falls  with  demo- 
cratic indifference,  lighting  each  one  impartially, 
and  none  of  them  as  they  were  meant  to  be  lit. 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  165 

With  this  division,  then,  established  in  the 
methods  of  record,  the  Academy  teaching  certain 
things  and  the  Museum  all  things;  the  one 
analytical  and  in  sequence,  the  other  as  life 
teaches, — in  a  mass  of  facts,  —  we  come  to  feel 
that  to  bring  back  the  ancient  synthesis,  the 
two  divisions  forced  upon  us  by  modern  changes 
must  be  brought  together. 

What  we  need  to  think  of  to-day,  and  in  a 
certain  way  I  am  here  to  show  you,  is  that  the 
Museum  knows  more  than  the  Academy.  In  the 
smaller  arts,  in  that  innumerable  mass  of  mate- 
rials made  for  use,  or  what  we  call  mere  orna- 
ment, —  the  glass,  metal  work,  carvings  of  wood 
and  stone,  fragments  of  buildings,  leather,  tap- 
estry,—  the  teaching  is  evident.  Every  rule  has 
been  applied,  both  those  you  know  and  those  you 
have  not  heard  of.  It  might  almost  seem  at  first, 
if  the  museum  is  great  enough,  that  whatever  rule 
has  been  set  down  for  you  wiU  find  a  contra- 
diction —  and  a  triumphant  contradiction  —  in 
some  small  treasure,  some  choice  fragment  stored 
in  the  collections.     In  such  a  case,  it  will  always 


166  LECTURE  V 

be  that  your  teaching  has  been  too  narrow, — 
probably  not  narrow  so  far  as  any  execution  may 
have  gone  ;  because  that  of  itself  carries  its  own 
reasoning,  through  the  use,  and  sometimes  the 
predominance,  of  material ;  but  it  will  have  been 
because  some  question  of  practice,  quite  valid, — 
even  very  splendid,  —  has  been  put  before  you 
as  a  principle. 

And  in  no  division  of  the  arts  of  sight  has  there 
been  more  misapplied  ingenuity  of  teaching,  more 
narrowness  of  reasoning,  more  individual  asser- 
tion, more  professional  incapacity,  than  in  the 
law-making  which  has  been  done  in  our  century, 
for  the  reasonable  production  of  the  work  of  art 
that  we  call  decoration.  Perhaps  there,  more 
than  in  our  art  of  painting,  is  this  natural ; 
because  of  the  less  powerful,  human,  individual 
factor,  and  the  necessity  for  the  artist  to  carry 
out  such  forms  of  art  in  conjunction  with  others, 
his  superiors  in  the  social  management.  For  he, 
individually,  does  not  count  so  much:  his  material 
is  more  dominant  than  in  any  other  form  of  art, 
—  I  mean  more  rebellious,  less  a  creation  of  his 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  167 

own  (compare  at  the  two  extremes  a  drawing  in 
ink  and  a  stained-glass  window);  and  he  works 
already  to  supply  some  wish  of  others ;  and  he  is 
directed,  therefore,  somewhat  by  the  taste  of  the 
day ;  somewhat  by  the  larger  interests,  for  instance, 
of  architects,  some  of  whose  work  he  supplies. 
But  whenever  one  wishes  to  breathe  freely  again ; 
whenever  one  wishes  to  see  freedom  in  the  use  of 
material ;  whenever  one  wishes  to  see  the  man  and 
not  the  workshop,  the  artist  and  not  the  trader, 
the  poet,  not  the  schoolmaster,  then,  tired  and  dis- 
gusted with  the  present  incapacity,  —  the  present 
deplored,  undoubted  incapacity, — one  shall  find  in 
the  museums  a  rest  to  the  mind,  and  perhaps,  as 
man  after  all  is  the  same,  a  hope  for  the  future. 

Remember  how  human  the  so-called  older  pieces 
of  little  art  seem  to  you,  when  compared  with 
the  modern.  Recognize,  then,  how  you  come 
across  the  result  of  that  same  principle  which 
we  first  recognized,  that  the  man  is  almost  every- 
thing, and  that  anything  which  does  not  allow 
us  to  feel  this  is  at  once  the  imitation  and  not 
the  reality;  be  it  a  piece  of  machine-made  lace. 


168  LECTURE  V 

or  a  regulation  stained-glass  window,  or  the  nine- 
teenth century  carving  of  a  Renaissance  fa9ade, 
or  the  fine  and  silly  tooling  of  a  piece  of  modern 
silver. 

And  do  not  think  that  even  in  the  slightest 
way,  by  drawing  your  attention  to  what  are 
called  the  minor  arts,  I  go  outside  of  what  I 
am  teaching  you.  If  I  should  ask  you  to  come 
upstairs  with  me,  and  look  at  some  little  piece 
of  Japanese  lacquer,  for  instance,  with  a  surface 
suggesting  the  weight,  as  well  as  the  mystery,  of 
moonlight;  with  depths  of  shadow  that  are  typ- 
ical of  the  art  of  varnish  glazes;  with  irides- 
cences like  those  of  living  birds  or  insects ;  with 
sparklings  recalling  the  track  of  the  stars  in 
water;  with  patterns  firm  like  the  pattern  of 
a  flower; — and  all  so  dwelling  in  unity  that 
you  cannot  think  of  their  being  displaced  from 
the  little  world  of  box  or  tray  in  which  they 
live,  —  so  that  to  the  eye,  they  give  the  pleas- 
ure of  notes  of  music  in  accord  ;  —  if  I  took  you 
to  look  at  sucli  a  thing,  as  a  lesson,  it  would  be, 
among  other  things,  a  lesson  of  what  w6  divide 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  169 

as  colour  and  composition.  That  is,  as  you  know, 
the  special  line  in  which  the  Museum  has  re- 
quested me  to  direct  my  teaching.  And  there 
is  but  one  way  of  considering  such  a  division : 
and  that  is,  that  it  is  almost  so  large  as  to 
include  all  that  your  eye  can  possibly  light  on. 
You  know  that  what  you  see  is  translated  to 
you  by  some  effect  of  coloured  light,  and  you 
know  that  that  effect  is  placed  within  certain 
laws  of  arrangement  which  we  study  out  in 
some  cases,  and  call  perspective ;  but  which,  in 
other  cases,  are  so  obscure,  or  rather  so  compli- 
cated, that  all  we  can  do  is  to  assume  that  they 
all  must  fall  within  a  universal  geometry.  So 
that  we  can  feel  at  ease  in  the  spaces  occupied 
by  all  the  arts  that  appeal  to  the  sight,  and  get 
from  each  or  any  what  setting  right  we  require. 
Perhaps  in  the  way  that  you  think  of  your 
drawings,  in  the  way  that  you  make  your  first 
drawings  in  black  and  white;  first,  perhaps, 
from  casts,  then  from  the  model  placed  in  a 
light  before  you,  which  allows  you  to  see  it 
more  by  light  and  shade  than  by  its  local  colour, 


170  LECTURE  V 

—  that  is  to  say,  by  that  flesh-colour  which  it 
has  in  common  with  all  other  flesh,  —  you  have 
learned  to  think  of  your  impression  of  sight  as 
having  been  first  a  sight  of  black  and  white, 
or  a  sight  of  form. 

Let  us  remember  our  consideration  of  how,  on 
the  contrary,  this  representation  by  what  we 
call  a  drawing,  of  light  and  colour  and  shadow 
(determined  by  an  edge)  was  recognized  by  us 
as  being,  on  the  contrary,  a  final  synthesis  —  a 
sort  of  abstraction ;  that  you  or  the  savage  be- 
gan at  the  final  end,  which  was  a  brief  and 
violent  summing  up  of  all  seen,  in  the  least  real 
of  all  possible  expressions.  You  will  remember 
that  the  savage,  by  two  long  lines,  which  he 
swept  from  an  imaginary  central  one  and  in 
opposition,  gave  you  a  shape  of  a  fish,  that  is 
to  say,  with  two  black  lines  which  did  not 
exist  (for  there  are  no  black  lines  that  con- 
stitute a  fish;  there  are  only  the  edges  of  the 
place  which  the  fish  occupies  and  a  r^sum^  of 
thousands  of  these  edges  in  one) ;  that  these  two 
or   three    lines    represented    a    surface    brilliant 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIOKS  171 

and  shining  in  colour;  covered  with  hard  scales, 
flecked  with  dots  and  patches;  glistening  with 
muscular  action ;  itself  placed,  if  in  the  water, 
against  a  moving  luminous  background  and  in- 
volved in  it;  or  if  thrown,  let  us  say,  upon  the 
grass,  against  a  background  formed  of  multi- 
tudes of  dots  and  lines  of  light  and  shadow, 
and  patches  of  transparency,  of  a  colour  as  uni- 
form, as  soft  and  rich  as  the  surface  of  the 
fish  was  many-coloured  and  iridescent.  Can 
anything  be  more  abstract,  as  I  showed  you, 
than  the  fact  that  these  two  things  that  do 
not  exist  give  you  the  image  of  the  fish?  — 
provided  always  that  you  have  seen  a  fish. 
Had  you  never  seen  one,  or  anything  like  it, 
that  fish  would  not  exist  in  this  drawing.  Sup- 
pose, on  the  contrary,  that  we  could  paint  in 
some  approximate  way  after  nature;  and  give 
the  colours,  the  brilliancy,  the  light  and  shade 
which  make  the  appearance  of  the  creature  and 
determine  its  form  —  determine  the  way  that  we 
think  it  would  feel  if  we  put  our  hand  on  it  — 
and  that  behind  that  fish  we  could  render  ade- 


172  LECTURE  V 

quately  the  surface  or  surfaces  of  the  grass. 
Then,  though  you  might  not  have  seen  one, 
you  would  be  incalculably  nearer  the  certainty 
of  the  reality  of  the  meaning  of  these  marks. 
Roughly,  I  might  say,  you  would  see  the  fish,  and 
recognize  some  sort  of  animal  unknown  to  you. 
You  have  probably  been  well  taught  —  I  may 
say  certainly;  but  many  of  us  have  not  been 
well  taught;  and  we  are  often  made  to  be- 
lieve that  the  first  objects  that  our  memory  of 
sight  recalls  —  and  hence  reproduces  —  are  not 
colours  and  light,  but  really  form.  And  we  are 
told  so  because  with  most  men  colour  does  not 
seem  to  be  the  thing  of  most  interest.  That 
may  be  perfectly  true  —  it  may  be  perfectly  true 
of  the  artist,  even  of  the  artist  of  highly  organ- 
ized temperament  and  of  great  culture ;  but  the 
two  questions  should  not  be  confused.  Our  sen- 
sation is  one  thing  and  the  conscious  interest 
that  we  take  in  the  sensation  is  another;  as  it 
is  we  who  do  the  thing,  our  record  being  a 
record  of  our  interest  in  the  matter,  if  we  de- 
light in  this  or  in  that,  and   we  make  a  record 


MAU,  OR  ILLUSIONS  1*7S 

of  it  SO  far  as  we  are  artists,  we  can  be  satisfied ; 
as  it  might  be  if,  instead  of  taking  an  interest 
in  the  representation  of  the  thing,  we  took  an 
interest  in  its  classification,  as  scientific  men 
might  do,  —  nay,  even  in  its  profit  to  us  by  sale 
or  purchase,  as  merchants  do.  But  its  sensation 
to  us,  which  we  translate  into  what  we  wish,  is  a 
luminous  coloured  sensation. 

Of  course  I  refer  to  the  eye  which  is  sensitive 
in  what  we  call  the  normal  way  —  that  is  to  say, 
is  not  colour-blind.  Whether  the  eye  of  man  was 
originally  so,  or  has  gradually  become  so,  and  the 
deadness  to  colour  impressions  of  a  part  of  the 
retina  is  a  remnant  of  an  earlier,  less  cultured 
stage,  is  out  of  my  line,  and  practically  has  very 
little  value ;  like  the  question,  whether  the  savage, 
or  the  ancient  Greek,  who  was  perfect  in  all  things 
but  that,  would  have  less  perception  of  colour 
because  he  did  not  carry  the  whole  dictionary 
in  his  mind. 

The  fact  that  the  colour  has  no  name  to  the 
person  who  recognizes  it,  is  of  no  consequence  to 
us  painters.     We  all  know  that  we  painters  find 


174  LECTURE  V 

it  extremely  difficult  to  tell  the  names  of  colours 
to  outsiders,  while  we  can  reproduce  them  in  a 
way  that  they  cannot.  So  with  the  savage  whom 
I  have  met,  and  whose  vocabulary  is  so  slight 
that  red  and  purple  and  orange  have  a  similar 
name,  the  slightest  change  of  colour  in  fruit  or 
leaves,  or  the  plumage  of  animals,  or  the  scales  of 
fish,  or  the  surface  of  the  sea,  or  the  moisture  of 
the  atmosphere,  is  detected,  in  a  way  to  make 
even  a  careful  painter  ashamed  of  his  inadequate 
colour  training. 

As  the  savage,  after  all,  uses  his  observation 
of  these  colours  for  another  purpose  than  the 
enjoyment  of  the  colours  themselves,  to  him  they 
are  indications  rather  of  the  form  or  of  the  state 
of  the  thing ;  and  possibly,  if  I  were  to  examine 
him,  he  would  rather  give  me  an  account  of  it  in 
such  a  way  as  to  eliminate  the  colour  and  describe 
the  form.  We  only  fix  our  attention  upon  our 
sensations  insomuch  as  we  can  use  them  for  the 
knowledge  of  exterior  objects.  Hence,  for  a  good 
many  of  us,  notwithstanding  that  we  recognize 
certain  things   only  by  the  variation   of   colour, 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  175 

we  only  think  of  them  as  in  their  usefulness  to 
us.  If,  for  example,  the  fruit  that  a  boy  took  up 
were  deficient  in  colour,  and  in  that  way  showed 
him  that  it  was  not  ripe  —  he  would  eat  it  all  the 
same,  I  know,  but  he  would  know  very  well  what 
it  was  that  he  was  eating;  and  we  who  are  no 
longer  boys  would  reject  it. 

If,  for  example,  I  meet  a  friend  whose  colour 
strikes  me  as  altered,  who  is  pale,  yellowish, 
whose  lips  are  no  longer  red,  whose  hair  seems 
less  rich,  what  I  say  and  what  I  think  is,  "  He 
is  ill."  The  sensation  of  colour  that  I  have 
received  is  translated  into  an  intellectual  descrip- 
tion ;  but  this  very  fact,  we  will  see,  proves  that 
I  have  stored  away  a  whole  treasure-house  of 
colour  impressions,  since  I  compare  them  again 
with  the  colour  impression  of  the  moment. 

The  illustrations  that  I  could  give  would  be 
so  numerous,  that  I  shall  only  call  up  that 
one  which  occurs  to  me  from  having  looked,  a 
moment  ago,  at  the  surface  of  some  china,  which 
surface,  by  its  colour  and  light,  by  the  exact 
value,  as  we  painters  call  it,  —  the   amount   of 


176  LECTURE  V 

brilliancy,  —  and  suggestion  of  material  by  that 
exact  brilliancy, — decided  for  me  the  question  of 
its  authenticity. 

The  question  of  the  pleasure  that  we  take  in 
recalling  this  freshness  cf  the  first  impressions, 
all  made  through  light  and  colour,  is  the  question 
of  the  pleasure  one  takes  in  painting;  that  is 
to  say,  in  abstaining  from  abstraction,  and  trying 
to  give  a  full  result  in  keeping  with  the  wish 
of  recording  the  face  of  the  world,  in  such  a  way 
that  the  actual  voice  of  nature,  in  its  first  call 
to  us,  is  still  fresh  in  our  memory. 

Examples  might  help  you :  might  mitigate  the 
harshness  of  such  general  statements  as  the 
pressure  of  time  obliges  me  to  make.  Were  I 
carrying  out  these  readings  (as  they  well  might 
be  carried  out)  into  long  talks,  where  the  hazards 
of  the  moment  would  allow  me  to  modify  the 
use  of  examples,  by  cautioning  you  in  regard  to 
what  part  of  my  examples  I  wished  you  to  see, 
I  should  state  nothing  without  some  reference  to 
a  thing  of  present  sight.  But  no  museum  would 
be  large  enough  for  one  side,  and  on  another  I 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  177 

should  need  the  scientist's  apparatus  to  make 
you  follow  delicate  experiments. 

I  say  this  because  it  occurred  to  me,  but  a 
moment  ago,  that  I  might  use  some  painting 
from  above,  in  the  Museum,  to  draw  your  atten- 
tion to  the  fulness  of  my  meaning  when  I  speak 
of  painting  and  of  the  painter  —  in  the  strictest 
sense,  the  more  modern  one  —  and  speak  of  what 
painting  gives  in  its  greatest  power  of  mirroring 
the  world. 

We  are  speaking  as  if  we  were  judges,  and  as 
I  said  to  you,  we  are  speaking  of  some  one  of 
our  family,  when  we  discuss  any  artist  and  ap- 
preciate him  as  if  we  were  his  equals.  Let  us 
take  some  painting  by  Mr.  Bonnat.  If  you  will 
remember  how  we  described  the  methods  of  the 
engraver,  his  patchwork  and  crossed  lines,  you  can 
put  yourself  perfectly  in  the  place  of  the  artist 
accustomed  to  such  illusions  of  sight  in  black  and 
white,  who  will  see  nothing  but  what  his  eye  is 
accustomed  to  when  he  notices  that  Mr.  Bonnat 
models  fingers  and  hands  and  flesh,  with  strokes 
and  markings  of  black  like  those  of  the  engraver. 


178  LECTURE  V 

As  I  told  you,  for  him  they  melted  in  his  eye 
at  once ;  while  another  artist,  less  accustomed  to 
reduce  things  seen  to  black  and  white  equations, 
would  see  these  tones  more  separately,  as  if  they 
had  been  transferred  to  a  painting  from  an 
engraving.  You  might  tell  me  that  you  saw 
things  so,  if  you  explained  to  me  while  you  were 
copying  the  method  of  Mr.  Bonnat. 

As  far  as  you  can  see  anything,  you  might 
perhaps  go  so  far  as  to  tell  me  that  you  saw 
things  modelled  in  that  direction ;  that  is  to  say, 
that  these  curves  represented  curves  which  de- 
scribed the  sense  of  modelling.  They  are  half- 
way between  the  intention  of  a  painter  and  a 
sculptor. 

Admire  Mr.  Bonnat  for  his  success  in  using 
this  other  method,  without  injuring  the  meaning 
of  his  work ;  but  when  you  think  of  what  you 
see,  remember  better,  as  a  record  of  absolute 
observation,  the  splendid  portraits  by  Rembrandt 
which  Mr.  Havemeyer  once  loaned  to  the  Museum. 
There,  naively,  like  a  child,  like  a  great  man, 
like  a  Shakespeare  in  prose,  Rembrandt  filled  in 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  179 

every  space,  as  if  he  had  never  known  any  method 
of  any  other  art.  Flesh  tone  followed  flesh  tone, 
and  tints  of  clothing  and  of  hair,  of  fur,  of  linen, 
followed  each  other  in  a  mosaic  of  adjustment 
so  perfect  as  to  make  the  French  painter  look 
like  an  engraver  in  colourless  material.  Of  course 
there  is  injustice  in  the  actual  words  that  I  use ; 
between  the  two  men  there  is  no  comparison  as 
painters,  but  there  is  as  seekers  after  character, 
as  placers  of  the  individual  human  being  before 
you.  Hence  Mr.  Bonnat  loses  nothing  by  the 
photograph ;  sometimes  even  he  is  better  there, 
or  in  the  engraving,  the  birthplace  of  certain 
parts  of  his  manner  of  painting. 

The  functioning  of  our  perceptions  of  sensations 
of  the  very  simplest  character  is  so  automatic 
that  it  is  not  often  possible  to  make  their  existence 
evident  to  every  one.  In  a  general  way,  as  we 
all  know,  we  conceive  with  most  trouble  that 
thing  the  possession  of  which  is  to  us  the  most 
familiar  and  the  most  certain.  The  actions  of 
our  organization  are  so  much  ourselves  that  we 
certainly  never  realize  in  action  their  enormous 


180  LECTURE  V 

complication  and  their  possible  subdivision  by 
analysis. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  a  painter,  then,  the 
painter  as  I  at  first  defined  him,  —  the  painter  of 
our  day,  the  artist  anxious  to  analyze  in  the 
construction  of  his  work,  as  he  synthesizes  in  the 
effect  of  it  upon  us,  —  what  we  see  first  is  not 
form,  but  lights,  colours;  colours  that  contrast, 
and  colours  that  are  broken  or  mixed.  The 
sensation  of  coloured  space  or  extent  leads  for  the 
painter  to  that  of  a  solid  image,  and  his  work  of 
art  is  what  has  been  called  an  equation  of  light. 

However  abridged  and  transposed  is  our  rep- 
resentation, we  are  urged  to  it  through  a  desire 
to  enter  into  the  intimacy  of  nature ;  and  in 
establishing  that  relation,  we  have  to  bring  in 
the  use  of  faculties  which  we  divide,  when 
we  try  to  classify  them,  into  faculties  of  per- 
ception, attention  and  memory.  Our  organism 
records  impressions  afjter  the  original  excitement 
of  them  has  passed.  Consecutive  images  persist 
for  a  time,  and  through  this  persistence  of  cult- 
ure by   us  our  faculty  becomes  stronger.     Even 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  181 

in  what  we  suppose  to  be  inattention,  —  in  what 
we  call  absent-mindedness,  —  memories  are  read- 
justed which  we  recall  afterwards,  and  we  say, 
"  I  remember  now  that  there  was  such  and  such 
a  thing."  Or  even  we  may  say,  "  There  was 
just  something  I  don't  remember." 

We  readjust,  perhaps  with  greater  difficulty, 
things  that  we  owe  to  our  visual  memory.  If 
it  were  possible  to  compare  music  with  painting, 
we  should  feel  convinced  that  it  is  easier  to 
recall  the  details  of  a  piece  of  music  than  of 
a  painted  composition.  Any  one  can  notice  — 
even  ourselves,  the  painters  —  how  much  sooner 
we  can  remember  a  melody  than  we  can  recall 
with  similar  certainty  the  arrangement  of  a 
painting.  With  each  of  us,  also,  the  intensity 
of  what  might  be  called  our  sight,  that  is  to 
say,  the  strength  of  the  momentary  impression 
and  the  later  recrudescence  of  the  same,  through 
memory,  varies  extremely.  With  certain  eyes  the 
colour  space,  with  others  the  edge  of  that  space, 
—  the  outline,  —  remains  more  distinctly.  With 
us,  the  use  of  the  hand,  which  translates  into 


182  LECTURE  V  ^ 

muscular  energy  the  attention  given  by  the  eye, 
is  the  process  which  records  our  memories,  and 
which  to  a  great  extent  recalls  them  to  us  — 
forces  them  back,  through  some  extraordinary 
connection.  The  hand  would  then  have  a  special 
memory,  and  later  I  shall  draw  your  attention 
to  it. 

You  will  remember  how  we  clearly  saw  that 
drawing  from  life  is  an  exercise  of  memory.  It 
might  be  said  that  the  sight  of  the  moment 
is  merely  a  theme  upon  which  we  embroider 
the  memories  of  former  likings,  former  aspira- 
tions, former  habits,  images  that  we  have  cared 
for,  and  through  which  we  indicate  to  others 
our  training,  our  race,  the  entire  educated  part 
of  our  nature.  It  is  so  much  so  that  this 
memory  of  the  more  conventional  side  of  our 
artistic  feeling  is  organized  more  easily  than 
that  of  the  colour  and  light,  —  that  is  to  say, 
the  real  momentary  impression  that  we  receive. 

For  hundreds  of  artists  who  have  done  great 
things  in  the  record  of  their  teaching  and  their 
love  of  abstractions  of   line,   for  instance,  there 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  183 

is  not  more  than  one  who  has  recorded  for  us 
the  magic  of  colour,  the  mystery  of  light.  In 
other  words,  the  man  of  line  is  far  less  rare  than 
the  man  of  light. 

Could  we  devote  some  special  time  to  it,  we 
might  consider  how  we  are  so  accustomed  to 
see  with  our  two  eyes  that  it  is  difficult  for 
us  to  get  a  representation  of  what  the  single 
eye  would  do.  In  the  rapid  review  of  the  tech- 
nique, if  I  may  so  call  it,  of  artistic  vision,  we 
shall  be  obliged  to  put  aside  any  present  con- 
sideration of  this  question  of  the  manner  in 
which  we  make  out  of  these  different  sights  a 
single  sight ;  and  how,  in  reality,  with  them 
both,  we  never  see  simply.  But  you  can  recall 
how  the  single  circle  of  each  side  of  the  opera- 
glass  merges  into  an  oval;  how  with  one  eye 
we  realize  a  greater  depth;  how  with  two  we 
broaden  our  sight;  how  with  the  habit  of  seeing 
surfaces  larger  with  two  eyes  than  with  one,  we 
exaggerate  the  size  of  smaller  objects ;  how  we 
disfigure  with  the  two  eyes  a  small  square,  for 


184  LECTtJRE  V 

instance,  which  seems  to  us  higher  than  it  is 
wide,  as  long  as  we  fix  it,  while  it  becomes  wider 
as  we  see  it  from  the  side.  It  would  certainly 
be  of  use  to  us  to  go  through  the  question  in 
a  lengthy  way,  because,  though  the  artist  has 
worked  from  the  beginning  without  help  of  such 
analysis,  still  all  reasoning  about  his  use  of  this 
first  necessary  tool,  the  eye,  will  give  him  the 
advantage  of  a  sort  of  gymnastics,  a  sort  of 
hygienic  exercise,  which  may  occasionally  help 
him  in  moments  of  doubt,  or  may,  on  the  other 
hand,  reconcile  him  with  those  difficulties  which 
arise  from  his  constitution,  and  which  he  might 
otherwise  ascribe  to  the  objects  outside  of  him, 
whose  adequate  memorial  he  desires  to  preserve. 
Or  else  he  might  imagine  that  he  had  more 
special  difficulties  peculiar  to  himself,  and  lose 
that  directness  which  is  one  of  his  greatest 
charms.  But  he  might  be  relieved,  for  instance, 
from  being  troubled  too  much  at  finding  that 
one  eye  sees  colour  in  a  difiPerent  way  from  the 
other,  and  asking  himself  which  one  is  right. 
Or,  as  you  were  probably  taught  at  first,  he  will 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  185 

know  that  the  photograph,  which  is  of  such  use 
to  him,  which  helps  him  out  of  so  many  difficul- 
ties, by  preserving  memories  of  sight  that  he 
cannot  remember,  by  its  cold-blooded  indiffer- 
ence, by  its  sudden  perception  of  fleeting  acci- 
dents—  that  the  photograph  gives  him  only  an 
image  seen  by  one  eye. 

And  as  to  the  very  capacity  of  sensation,  we 
know  how  much  that  varies  with  each  personal 
factor,  —  with  age,  with  our  habit  of  noticing, 
with  the  way  we,  feel  at  the  time,  and  with  our 
practice.  He  who  has  learnt  to  work  in  a  faint 
light  ends  by  seeing  as  clearly  as  he  who  works  in 
much  light ;  although  the  outside  light  be  not  the 
same  for  each.  And,  conversely,  you  may  have 
noticed  that  the  landscape  before  you,  which  at 
first  is  so  radiant  with  light  as  to  contrast  strongly 
in  your  mind  with  the  tone  of  the  objects  seen 
within  doors,  assumes,  after  a  time,  greater 
depth  of  colour,  a  greater  amount  of  modelling, 
consequently  a  greater  proportion  of  shadow.  So 
much  so,  that  working  a  whole  day  in  the  sun- 
shine enables  one  to  consider  the  depth  of  colour- 


186  LECTURE  V 

ing  as  of  equal  interest  with  the  brightness  and 
intensity  of  light  which  was  the  first  impres- 
sion.^ 

Need  I  speak  of  the  illusions  produced  by  the 
contrast  of  a  colour  ?  Need  I  go  into  the  diffi- 
culty of  adjusting  that  relation  between  the  oppo- 
sitions of  colour  and  our  eye,  —  those  it  detects  in 
nature,  and  the  necessity  that  we  have  to  repro- 
duce these  analogies,  to  reinforce  them  or  to 
weaken  them,  because  the  luminous  scale  of 
nature  is  not  enclosed  within  the  limit  of  our  pal- 
ette, and  light  has  to  be  translated  into  pigment? 
These  complementary  analogies  are  felt  by  us 
where  they  are  perhaps  only  indicated  or  supposed 
to  exist  in  nature."     Here  what  I  should  like  to 

1  You  will  remark  that  this  fact  widens  enormously  the  range  of 
the  plein  air,  "out  of  doors"  rendering  between  extremes  of  depth 
and  lightness. 

*  My  friend,  Mr.  Roelker,  has  pointed  out  to  me  the  following 
extract,  which  confirms  our  perceptions  of  the  early  instinct  of  artists 
as  such. 

"The  artist  could  derive  little  advantage  from  that  theory  by 
which  the  optician,  with  his  negative  efforts,  explained  the  phenomena 
which  took  place.  For  although  he  and  the  other  spectators  admired 
the  bright  colours  of  the  prism  and  felt  their  harmony,  yet  it  always 
remained  an  enigma  for  him,  to  know  how  to  distribute  them  among 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  187 

have  would  be  the  knowledge  of  a  lecturer  whom 
you  heard  last  winter,  whose  name  is  everywhere 
associated  with  the  question  of  colour.  With  such 
a  great  dictionary  of  information,  of  experiment, 
I  should  be  able  to  touch  lightly  on  the  subject, 
and  yet  to  give  you  the  suggestion  of  what  you 
have  either  read  about,  or  will  read  about  when 
you  wish  to  be  thoroughly  informed  of  how  we 
feel  colour,  and  through  it  see,  in  a  more  mascu- 
line way,  the  means  of  recording  it.  I  refer  to 
Professor  Rood  of  Columbia  College,  whose  writ- 
ings were  a  consolation  to  me  long  ago,  in  my 

the  objects  which  he  had  formed  and  arranged  according  to  certain 
conditions. 

"A  great  portion  of  the  harmony  of  a  picture  depends  upon  the 
light  and  shade  ;  but  the  proportion  of  colours  to  light  and  shade  was 
not  so  easily  discovered,  and  yet  every  painter  could  soon  see  that  his 
picture  could  attain  perfection  only  through  the  combination  of  both 
harmonies,  and  that  it  was  not  sufficient  to  mix  a  colour  with  black  or 
brown  to  make  it  the  proper  colour  for  shading.  Many  experiences, 
in  conjunction  with  an  eye  favoured  by  nature,  the  practice  of  feel- 
ing, expression,  and  the  example  of  great  masters,  brought  artists  to  a 
high  degree  of  excellence,  although  they  covdd  hardly  communicate 
the  rules  according  to  which  they  acted  ;  by  looking  at  a  large  picture 
gallery,  one  can  easily  convince  oneself  of  the  fact  that  every  master 
has  had  a  different  way  of  handling  colours."  —  Goethe,  Contribu- 
tions to  Optics,  1791,  Introduction. 


188  LECTURE  V 

attempts  at  disentangling  what  was  right  in  my 
instinctive  apparitions. 

And  not  only  must  the  painter  gather  together 
these  effects  of  light,  both  those  he  thinks  are 
objective,  —  that  is  to  say,  are  discerned  by  him 
outside,  —  and  those  that  are  subjective,  —  that  is 
to  say,  are  translated  through  him,  by  his  own 
exaggeration  or  his  own  diminution  in  rendering, 
—  but  he  must  also  obtain  the  effects  of  relief  in 
the  same  way,  by  simplification  or  exaggeration. 
On  a  flat  surface  he  must  give  the  sense  of  space, 
and  accommodate  the  two  visions,  of  the  one  eye, 
for  which  he  has  perspective,  and  of  the  two  eyes, 
which  cannot  be  traced  for  his  uses  by  geometry. 
Representation  then,  in  comparison  of  the  phe- 
nomena of  light,  demands  reflection  and  practice. 
I  believe  that  Kant  has  said  that  "  our  senses  do 
not  deceive  because  they  do  not  judge.  All  illu- 
sion is  to  be  charged  to  the  intellect,  which  often 
misjudges  the  material  offered  by  the  senses." 
Which  otherwise  might  be  transposed  into  saying 
that  our  senses  do  not  present  the  ultimate  phe- 
nomena, more  especially  the  sense  of  sight;   for 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  189 

there  are  no  luminous  rays  that  are  blue  or  red  or 
so  forth ;  but  certain  rays,  of  different  wave-lengths, 
wake  up  within  us,  through  some  mechanism  of  our 
organization,  a  sensation  of  what  we  call  blue  or 
red.  It  is  for  our  intellect  to  know  these  phe- 
nomena and  to  put  them  in  order,  to  weaken  them 
or  strengthen  them,  to  enforce  and  illustrate  them, 
to  ennoble  them  through  our  admiration,  and 
through  that  love  to  make  them  beautiful. 


Let  us  think  of  a  few  of  the  appearances  of 
things  which  misinterpret  other  facts  behind 
them.     The  list  is  endless. 

Equally  lit,  a  long-waved  colour  is  more  im- 
portant than  a  short-waved  colour.  Frank  com- 
plementary discontinuities,  as,  for  instance,  black 
and  white,  bright  red  and  deep  green,  may  empha- 
size the  division  of  coloured  spaces,  but  render  all 
the  more  difficult  the  comparative  gauge  of  their 
real  dimensions.  To  any  one  accustomed  to  draw, 
in  the  usual  way,  a  colourless  object,  it  will  be 
difficult  to  avoid  mistakes  when  translating  into 


190  LECTURE  V 

black  and  white  a  model  of  one  complementary 
colour  placed  against  its  complementary  back- 
ground. A  long  rectangle,  tinted  in  its  upper 
half  by  a  long-waved  colour,  in  its  lower  half  by 
a  short-waved  colour,  will  appear  larger  above 
than  below.  The  space  comprised  between  two 
light  lines  upon  a  dark  ground  will  seem  narrower 
than  the  same  space  enclosed  between  two  dark 
lines  on  a  light  ground.  The  distances  between 
the  stars  seem  to  diminish  when  the  moon  shines 
in  the  sky  near  them.  Two  black  lines  which 
appear  parallel  traced  upon  a  white  ground,  no 
longer  seem  so  if  the  end  of  one  be  tinted  with 
light  red,  and  the  extremity  of  the  other  with 
dark  blue.  Two  red  flowers  on  a  green  ground 
seem  nearer,  one  to  the  other,  than  two  blue 
flowers ;  the  light  gains  in  size  and  the  dark  loses 
in  proportion. 

These  illusions  which  we  recognize,  which  pre- 
vent our  giving  to  ourselves  an  accurate  account 
of  certain  properties,  certain  qualities  of  the  things 
that  we  look  at,  we  can  ourselves  use  in  the  illu- 
sion that  we  now  in  turn  shall  create  in  our  work 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  191 

of  art.  The  last  examples  that  I  have  just  given 
you,  if  you  have  had  any  practice  at  all,  will  occur 
to  you  as  means  of  increasing  the  appearance  of 
space  or  of  depth,  or  of  narrowing  and  diminish- 
ing the  same,  and  these  means  have  been  used  by 
painters  from  early  times. 

And  here  I  remember  a  deception  of  sight  that 
I  have  occasionally  referred  to  with  my  pupils, 
when  they  insisted  that  they  were  able  to  judge 
absolutely  of  the  size  or  length  of  some  given 
space  or  line.  Here  are  two  lines,  which  you  see 
are  of  equal  length,  and  at  the  extremities  of  each 
I  draw  two  angles  meeting  them  in  opposite  ways. 

> < 


< > 

As  you  see,  our  first  lines  have  changed  their 
length;  and  what  is  strange,  when  I  wipe  the 
first  lines  out,  the  spaces  which  both  of  them 
traversed  still  continue  to  appear  different  in 
length,  though  we  know  they  are  not. 

>  < 

<  > 


192  LECTURE  V 

This  is  again  a  double  lesson.  You  can  see  the 
variations  that  in  your  work  —  which  is  an  imita- 
tion of  the  effect  of  nature — you  can  produce, 
without  the  alteration  of  what  might  be  called 
real  dimension ;  whether  this  be  by  modelling  or 
by  opposing  lines.  When  you  cheat  in  your  little 
world  of  imitation,  you  do  not  cheat  any  more 
than  the  great  world  about  you  deceives  you. 
And  for  a  moment  yet  I  will  detain  you  on  the 
edges  of  this  endless  field  of  illusion. 

Our  sense  of  certain  sensations  becomes  dulled 
by  habit.  In  our  usual  attitude  we  feel  colour 
and  size  less  intensely;  but  should  we  displace 
the  eyes,  should  we  throw  our  head  to  one  side, 
the  colours  become  more  intense,  more  driven  in, 
one  upon  the  other ;  and  the  heights  that  we  see 
with,  the  usual  vision  change  with  this  displace- 
ment.' Often  you  have  been  surprised  by  what 
seemed  the  newer  beauty  of  the  landscape,  the 
mountains,  the  sky,  the  cloud  above,  reversed  in 
the  mirror  of  the  lake.     The  whole  scene  reversed 

1  Very  recent  ezperimente  testify  to  a  real  change  in  the  colour-  and 
form-fields. 


MAIA,    OR  ILLUSIONS  193 

is  reinforced  also,  —  the  gradation  of  colour,  the 
sense  of  modelling,  the  sense  of  retreat  of  the 
upper  surfaces  of  leaves  upon  leaves,  the  receding 
flanks  of  the  mountain,  the  more  evident  poise  of 
the  cloud  in  mid-air.  And  notice  that  in  all  your 
delight,  you  have  thought  of  it  as  a  painting. 

So  also  we  are  deceived  because  we  know,  and 
things  in  the  distance  retain  somewhat  the  size 
that  we  know  they  have ;  as  in  the  painting  of 
the  early  masters  the  human  figure  keeps,  even  in 
the  distance,  the  proportion  of  its  natural  superi- 
ority. In  faint  lights,  in  the  twilight,  in  the  fog, 
the  importance  of  objects  that  we  desire  to  see 
makes  them  change  their  apparent  size,  and  de- 
ceives us  as  to  what  they  are. 

And  we  are  deceived  —  but  that  you  do  not 
know  as  I  do  —  in  the  spaces  and  sizes  of  the 
landscapes  of  our  childhood.  When  we  see  them 
again,  they  are  measured  by  another  scale.  We 
do  not  know  if  all  men  see  with  an  equal  scale ; 
:md  we  cannot  even  know  whether  the  image 
that  we  receive  ourselves  remains  alike  from  its 
first  apparition  to  our  losing  it. 


194  LECTURE  V 

No  light  is  immovable;  and  it  may  be  said 
that  to  reproduce  life  is  to  reproduce  the  fluctua- 
tions of  the  movement  of  light ;  whether  it  be 
the  glance  of  the  eye,  the  play  of  the  smile  on 
the  lips,  —  that  expression  so  visible,  so  evasive 
when  fixed  by  our  eye,  of  intellectual  capacity,  — 
or  again,  the  movement  of  the  body  in  gesture, 
or  the  strain  of  muscles  in  action. 

Still  life,  as  it  is  called  when  thought  of  as 
art,  is  still  nature  animated ;  for  the  slight  move- 
ment of  shadows,  the  glistening  waves  of  air, 
the  shadowing  of  clouds,  are  all  expressions  of 
movement;  and,  indeed,  is  it  not  because  of 
this  that  at  certain  moments,  when  the  change 
is  slow  or  gradual,  we  feel  as  if  the  surface  of 
nature  slept? 

We  see  a  number  of  points  of  light  that  are 
joined,  apparently  one  to  another,  as  making  a 
continuous  line,  as  we  see  in  more  exaggerated 
cases  the  line  of  fire  described  by  a  torch  that 
is  waved,  or  the  straight  lines  given  by  the  fall 
of  drops  of  rain.  For  the  eye  which  sees,  the 
bird   that  flies   has   more   than    two  wings;    he 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  195 

may  have  four.  The  horse  at  full  pace  has 
more  than  four  legs;  he  has  at  least  eight.  It 
is  for  us  to  adjust  this  multiplicity  of  sights, 
and  in  some  way  render  the  appearance  of  con- 
tinual fluctuation.  Hence,  to  many  painters  — 
to  those  who  have  been  especially  fond  of  life, 
of  animation,  for  whom  action  and  passion  have 
been  of  most  importance,  or  who,  like  Rubens, 
have  insisted  beyond  everything  upon  the  living- 
ness  of  their  self -created  world  —  comes  a  fear  of 
petrifying  the  figures  that  they  paint,  by  too  sharp 
and  rigid  renderings,  and  they  try  to  avoid  sug- 
gesting that  their  eye  has  been  able  to  follow 
in  quiet  all  the  details  which  they  had  before 
them. 

So  also,  very  often,  the  intimation  of  an  unfin- 
ished sketch,  the  help  given  to  the  illusion  in 
the  suggestion  of  movement  by  the  retaining  of 
more  outlines  than  one ;  by  the  artist's  not  effac- 
ing slight  variations  in  these  outlines,  by  even 
keeping  sometimes  the  general  plan  indicated 
within  which  the  attitudes  are  expressed. 

There  is  a  great  deal  of  truth  in  a  statement 


196  LECTURE  V 

of  Vdron,  in  his  work  on  Esthetics.  And  many 
of  you  who  have  seen  the  drawings  that  he 
mentions  can  appreciate  the  meaning  of  his  crit- 
icism. "  Sketches,"  he  says,  "  are  in  general 
more  living  than  completed  drawings;  and  some 
years  ago  we  saw  rather  a  striking  example  of 
this.  TJie  Gazette  des  Beaux-Arts  had  published 
in  fac-simile  a  certain  number  of  sketches  by  Mr. 
Baudry,  for  his  work  in  the  Opera  House. 
They  had  an  animation  and  life  in  great  part 
lost  in  the  painted  work.  Gestures,  however, 
were  not  wanting  in  the  paintings  of  Mr.  Bau- 
dry. One  might  even  say  that  he  had  been  prod- 
igal of  them,  and  yet  *  cela  ne  remue  pas,'  — 
and  yet  all  is  stationary.  All  these  personages, 
notwithstanding  their  long  arms,  their  stretched- 
out  legs,  are  fixed  in  an  immobility  all  the  more 
disagreeable  because  it  contrasts  with  their  sup- 
posed movements.  Why,"  he  continues,  "such 
a  disastrous  transformation?  On  this  account, 
because  in  the  sketches  these  gestures  were  indi- 
cated by  a  multiplicity  of  neighbouring  outlines, 
which,   owing   to   this  very   neighbourhood,  ani- 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  197 

mated  the  figures  by  marking  their  several  move- 
ments— that  is  to  say,  several  successive  attitudes, 
all  perceived  within  the  same  movement;  while 
in  the  one  only  and  precise  outline  of  the  final 
rendering,  this  mixture  of  succession  and  of  simul- 
taneousness  has  completely  disappeared." 

Without  insisting  upon  the  excellence  of  his 
choice  in  this  case,  —  for  Mr.  Baudry  was  a  most 
elegant  and  refined  painter,  —  there  is  something 
fundamentally  true  in  these  remarks  of  the  French 
critic. 

Hence  in  the  very  movement  of  the  brush,  one 
wishes  to  see  the  sensation  of  movement  deeply 
felt.  Hence  our  annoyance  at  the  crystallization 
of  movement  given  to  us  in  the  instantaneous 
photograph,  that  makes  of  a  sea  of  water  a  sea  of 
hardened  metal. 

I  have  connected,  as  you  will  see,  the  im- 
pression of  sight  with  the  action  of  the  hand. 
The  voluntary  attention  of  the  artist  is  trans- 
formed into  muscular  energy,  ending  in  the  repro- 
duction of  images  by  the  hand,  and  forms  the 
first  part   of   an  extremely  complicated   process, 


198  LECTURE  V 

which  even  this  motion  of  the  hand  does  not  fully 
discharge ;  for  there  are  still  the  controlling  of 
possible  errors  by  the  sight,  exercised  again,  and 
by  that  power  of  thought  which  is  behind  every- 
thing. The  hand  will  even  act,  as  it  were,  as 
we  recognize  in  drawings  that  we  make  without 
our  looking  at  them,  even  while  we  think  of 
other  things,  —  or  in  the  extraordinary  way  in 
which,  when  ordered,  the  hand  will  work  while 
we  converse  with  our  model.  The  professional 
portrait  painter  in  that  way  carries  out  most 
astonishing  disassociations,  when  he  draws  out, 
for  instance,  the  political  notions  of  some  sitter 
whom  he  is  anxious  to  place  at  his  ease,  —  and 
seems  to  us,  who  are  not  in  the  secret  of  his 
interior  life,  more  absorbed  in  conversation  than 
in  his  painting. 

The  hand,  too,  as  we  said  before,  has  a  cer- 
tain memory  of  its  own,  and  works,  as  you  will 
remember,  more  easily  upon  accustomed  surfaces 
—  even  such  as  are  not  facile ;  as  the  delaying 
sand  I  spoke  of,  in  which  the  young  savages  traced 
their   images.      We  have   all   gone   through   the 


MAIA,   OR   ILLUSIONS  199 

suggestiveness  of  a  pleasant  paper  submitted  to 
tools  that  we  felt  would  suit  us.  We  feel  the 
materials  responsive  to  what  they  are  really  going 
to  express,  —  ourselves.  I  told  you  that  the  very 
touch  expresses  yourself. 

It  expresses  either  your  being  yourself,  or 
your  striving  to  be  Mr.  So-and-so.  It  expresses 
your  great  anxiety  to  repeat  the  movement  of 
light  in  nature;  the  manner  in  which  your  sense 
of  form  has  been  awakened  ;  your  sense  of  the 
depth  of  things  as  they  receded,  of  the  distinct- 
ness or  indistinctness  with  which  you  see  certain 
parts  of  the  luminous  coloured  spectacle  before  you.^ 
It  shows  whether  you  analyze  by  separating  or  by 
grouping  together  your  impressions  ;  whether  you 
keep  adding  fact  to  fact,  as  in  a  catalogue,  or 
whether  you  choose  deliberately,  or  whether  you 
subordinate,  making  one  point  you  have  detected 
in  your  sight  more  important  than  others,  and 
letting  others  derive  from  it.  It  will  look  careful, 
and  merely  patient  and  attentive ;  or  again,  as  if 

1  For  we  must  not  forget  that  painting  represents  not  only  what 
we  see,  but  what  we  do  not  see. 


200  LECTURE  V 

you  were  impressed  by  the  endless  mystery  of 
wliat  you  see.  It  may  look  cock-sure,  as  if  you 
didn't  find  so  much  in  things,  after  all ;  or  it  may 
look  as  if  you  admired  the  beautiful  swing  with 
which  you  did  things.  And  it  will  surely  tell 
whether  that  is  all  you  know,  or  whether  you  have 
a  store  of  memories,  only  implied  and  not  brought 
out. 

Hence  the  touch  of  a  great  master  is  something 
not  to  be  rivalled,  except  with  a  similar  equipment 
of  memory  of  the  eye,  and  an  equally  developed 
memory  of  the  hand. 

Nor  indeed  have  we  attained  the  mastery  of 
our  execution  until  the  hand  can  work  almost 
by  itself. 

Should  you,  indeed,  attempt  to  copy  the  final 
work  of  a  Rembrandt  or  a  Velasquez,  —  which 
is  a  final  synthesis  of  all  his  manners  of  work, 
the  result  of  an  enormous  series  of  memories 
preserved  or  rejected,  —  should  you  attempt  this, 
you  will  see  that  you  have  only  been  able  to  copy 
a  part  of  the  top  of  the  paint,  the  look  of  the 
surface  of  the  colour;  and  that  even  your  move- 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  201 

ment  of  hand  has  not  —  and  naturally  enough  — 
the  ease  that  comes  of  extraordinary  practice. 
Hence  you  will  never  wish  to  repeat  motions 
that  you  cannot  well  (I  shall  not  sa,j  fully)  under- 
stand ;  as  if  you  repeated  the  action  of  the  hands 
of  the  conjurer,  without  being  able  to  accomplish 
his  ends,  —  his  making  you  take  the  card  he 
wishes,  or  his  being  able  to  draw  out  of  your 
pockets  things  that  you  know  never  were  there. 
But  if  you  repeat  his  processes  of  study,  with 
similar  disposition  of  mind  and  body,  then  the 
action  of  the  hand  will  come  in  normally,  and 
have  all  the  value  of  a  gesture  meaning  some- 
thing. 

And  in  this  amplification  of  the  sense  of  the 
word  touch,  do  not  think  I  mean  only  the  actual 
contact  of  a  fraction  of  a  second.  There  is  no 
time  in  the  work  of  art.  The  long  processes  of  a 
Dutch  painter,  or  a  Venetian,  are  all  one  thing: 
the  firm  foundation  of  drawing;  the  graduated  U7i- 
derneaths,  as  painters  call  them;  the  veilings  of 
their  washes,  or  half-opaque  coverings  of  paint; 
the  glazings ;  the  retouchings ;  the  scumblings ;  the 


202  LECTURE  V. 

d raggings  of  coloured  substances,  are  all  one  thing, 
just  as  much  as  the  single  drop  of  india  ink 
put  on  a  kakemono  by  the  artist  of  Japan. 

It  is  only  another  way  of  expressing  the  mul- 
titudinousness  of  nature,  by  different  forms  of 
synthesis;  and  if  you  think  that  the  Japanese 
manner  of  running  a  brush  full  of  ink  on  paper 
or  silk,  is  a  short  way,  try  it.  In  their  schools 
they  give  many  years  —  a  length  of  time  which 
would  appall  your  young  "Western  minds  —  eight 
years  perhaps  —  to  get  an  adequate  representation 
of  the  touch  which  characterizes  the  school.  And, 
indeed,  it  might  happen  with  them  that  one  might 
hear  what  I  have  heard  :  "  So-and-so  of  a  couple 
of  hundred  years  ago  can  no  more  be  copied. 
The  last  man  is  dead  who  had  the  secret  trans- 
mitted to  him  through  all  this  time,  and  cultivated 
by  him  all  his  life.  So  that  it  is  not  to  be  hoped 
that  any  one  will  begin  it  all  over  again  in 
Japan." 

Let  us  never  be  deceived  by  the  slight  rapidity 
of  a  few  moments  or  a  few  years.  In  a  supposed 
case,  were  a  painter  to  devote  all  his  life  to  one 


MAIA,  OR  ILLUSIONS  203 

painting;  could  he  do  so;  were  he  great  enough 
to  do  so ;  to  make  a  vase  strong  and  fine  enough 
to  hold  these  feelings  of  his  whole  age, — he  would 
only  have  occupied  a  little  piece  of  time,  dispro- 
portionate in  relation  even  to  the  continuous  ex- 
istence in  time  of  the  world  he  attempts  to  mirror. 
In  the  execution  of  his  work  the  artist  is 
brought,  even  by  the  mere  mechanical  progress 
of  the  work,  to  a  recall  of  all  his  latent  conscious- 
ness. In  all  that  we  do  freely,  in  our  perception 
of  things,  we  are  obliged  to  join  together,  at  every 
moment,  thousands  of  former  visual  memories, 
recent  or  very  old,  to  the  perceptions  of  the 
moment.  From  the  first  movement  of  the  hand 
to  the  last — even,  as  I  said,  from  the  first  sight 
of  the  paper  or  the  canvas  on  which  the  painter 
is  to  draw,  every  moment  when  he  thinks  of 
work,  all  the  accumulated  images  come  back  to 
him,  and  have  a  right  upon  him.  Some  he  will 
welcome,  others  he  must  reject ;  what  he  has  that 
is  good  of  his  previous  education  will  be  a  source  of 
strength ;  where  he  has  made  mistakes,  where  he 
has  been  badly  taught,  where  he  has  been  incom- 


204  LECTURE  V 

petent  or  inattentive,  in  these  very  memories  he 
will  suffer  later.  In  a  certain  way,  what  he  is 
really  entering  upon  is  a  discovery  of  himself  in 
an  order  fatally  marked  for  him.  The  block  of 
marble  of  which  Michael  Angelo  speaks,  which 
contained  all  that  the  greatest  artist  could  ever 
find,  is  himself.  In  the  long  run  he  may  be  sure 
that  he  will  discover  himself ;  and  the  slow-grown 
genius  is  often  not  the  least  great.  Hence  the 
necessity  of  constant  work;  hence  the  necessity 
of  constant  purification  of  our  memories;  hence 
the  use,  not  only  of  our  own  memories,  but  of 
the  memories  of  others,  such  as  are  gathered  about 
us.  What  we  can  feel  sure  of  is  that  nothing 
has  been  done  once  for  all  —  that  all  the  illusions, 
the  realities,  have  not  yet  been  reproduced 
through  other  illusions,  and  that  no  matter  how 
completely  all  has  been  done,  all  the  more  chance 
for  you  to  do  it  again :  to  make  once  for  all, 
another  time,  the  Runner,  the  Sower,  the  Thrower 
of  the  Disc ;  to  paint  again,  as  for  the  last  time, 
the  great  sea  and  rushing  waterfall.  That  one 
window  open  upon  the  world  through  each  great 


MAIA,   OR  ILLUSIONS  205 

artist  is  closed  for  you,  but  out  of  all  others  you 
can  look,  and  within  their  frame  make  your  own 
picture  of  the  world  again.  The  very  fact  that  it 
has  all  been  done  is  enough  to  assure  you  that  it 
can  be  done  again,  and  done  as  never  before. 


LECTURE  VI 

SINCERITY 


SYNOPSIS  OF  LECTURE  VI 

The  contemplation  of  nature  has  moved  the  mind  of  man  to  ex- 
pression. —  Its  contradictions  make  us  realize  in  art  an  order  made  by 
us  according  to  our  reason.  —  In  the  work  of  art  man  is  the  measure  of 
all  things.  —  Meaning  of  the  word  design.  —  Confusion  in  the  work  of 
art  of  methods  belonging  to  different  memorial  systems.  —  This  confu- 
sion a  blot  in  the  logical  balanced  world  of  art,  usually  brought  about 
by  appropriation  of  the  works  of  others.  —  Self-righteousness  and 
belief  in  made-up  formulas.  —  Dependence  upon  a  grammar  meant  for 
other  purposes. — ^The  formulation  of  practice  as  principle. — Consequent 
dishonesty.  —  Every  complete  record  of  sight  must  contain  a  record  of 
our  ignorance.  —  The  attitude  of  the  child.  —  It  is  absurd  to  copy  the 
memories  of  others  so  as  to  pass  them  off  as  our  own :  it  is  profitable 
to  copy  them  so  as  to  purify  our  own.  —  Donatello,  Niccolo  Pisano, 
Raphael,  Michael  Angelo,  Rubens.  — As  our  art  is  composed  of  visual 
memories,  or  affected  by  them,  so  memories  of  thought  outside  of  what 
affects  handiwork  will  either  elevate  or  degrade  art.  —  The  subject  is 
merely  the  place  where  we  express  ourselves.  —  The  sculptor  Socrates, 
the  painters  Euripides  and  Pyrrho.  —  There  is  no  art  without  a  craft.  — 
Value  of  all  methods  that  can  avail.  —  Good  language  is  learned  by 
living  among  people  who  can  themselves  speak  well. 


LECTURE  VI 

SINCERITY 

If  before  now  I  have  sufficiently  brought  to 
your  minds  the  quality  of  the  memories  upon 
which  we  build ;  if  we  keep  in  mind  how  we  work 
with  prejudices  of  sight,  or  how  often  we  en- 
tangle one  matter  of  seeing  or  recording  sight 
with  another,  it  may  seem  that  though  we  are 
always  on  the  threshold,  on  the  edge  of  origi- 
nality,—  that  is  to  say  of  a  personal  solution  of  all 
memories  in  a  unity,  —  we  can  each  have  a  very 
little  of  it,  to  leaven  the  mass  with ;  but  yet  that 
a  very  little  of  personal  power  will  represent  a 
great  factor. 

In  that  way  I  could  say  again  that  all  is  to  do 
over  again ;  and  again  that  if  it  happened  to 
you  to  have  the  extreme  honour  of  re-inventing, 
you  will   have  the  delight    of   having    made   in 

r  209 


210  LECTURE  VI 

your  own  self  the  experiment  of  ages.  Over 
that  bridge  the  least  variation  will  bring  you 
into  newer  worlds. 

Always  has  man  been  interested  in  nature  in 
a  contemplative  manner.  I  mean  by  nature  what 
is  outside  of  ourselves,  man  included,  his  mean- 
ing, his  constitution,  as  well  as  the  world  he 
inhabits,  its  laws  and  its  appearances.  The  en- 
chantments of  nature  and  her  disillusions ;  the 
caresses  and  cares  she  has  for  us,  her  supreme 
indifference  to  our  individual  existence,  have  in 
turn  moved  the  mind  of  man  to  expression. 
The  struggles  of  moral  good  against  the  evil 
that  reigns  in  the  world ;  the  battle  of  will 
against  blind  fate ;  the  presence  of  the  constant 
pain  and  sorrow  which  are  the  basis  of  life;  the 
law  of  death  for  which  everything  lives,  —  have 
in  turn  been  spectacles  to  warm  or  chill. 

On  this  basis  have  rested  the  foundations  of 
love  and  pity,  of  courage,  of  law,  and  of  all 
the  virtues. 

The  contradictions  of  the  world  of  existence ; 
its  over-profusion;    its  escaping   at   every   point 


SmCERITT  211 

from  any  fixed  comprehension ;  its  suggesting 
the  opposite;  its  constantly  taking  in  our  eyes 
the  appearance  of  a  world  of  chance,  —  makes  us 
realize  in  art  another  world,  which  has  some 
rules,  some  order  made  to  our  stature,  to  our 
reason. 

In  the  made-up  stories  of  art  all  is  explained. 
They  come  to  an  end  deliberately  chosen ;  every 
detail  is  used  for  some  purpose  of  that  very 
story;  and  when  we  close  the  binding  of  the 
book,  we  really  come  to  an  end. 

It  is  not  so  in  nature :  but  in  art  the  end,  the 
meaning,  is  for  us;  we  are  the  final  cause;  in 
the  work  of  art  "man  is  the  measure  of  all 
things."  Each  form  of  art  is  a  restoration  of 
nature  to  what  she  should  be;  an  emphasis  of 
some  hidden  view  that  escapes  us,  otherwise, 
from  the  size  of  the  entire  world.  So  that  in 
the  forms  of  architecture  we  recognize,  with  the 
relief  that  we  call  the  sense  of  art,  the  setting 
forth  of  a  geometry,  —  a  proportion  which  the 
tangled  world  contains,  it  is  true,  but  does  not 
set   out   clear   and    unmixed,   without   contradic- 


212  LECTURE  VI 

tions,  without  hesitation  and  weakening.  The 
faint  curves  are  made  into  geometric  ones;  the 
horizontal  and  the  perpendicular,  which  are  ab- 
stractions, become  now  concrete  —  one  might  say 
living;  everywhere  all  is  developed  in  an  order 
implied  within  the  idea  of  structure.  At  last 
there  is  no  form  in  nature  which  does  not  sup- 
ply some  suggestion  of  abstract  form,  and  is  not 
told  of  in  some  settled  form  whose  final  establish- 
ment is  a  creation  of  man. 

And  so  in  the  arts  that  connect  with  architec- 
ture; which  are  mistakenly  said  to  be  derived 
from  it,  —  I  say  mistakenly,  because  the  instinct 
of  order,  of  repetition,  of  balance,  of  assertion 
and  discovery  of  geometric  form,  is  as  evident 
in  the  pearl-bead  bracelet  of  a  savage  girl,  in- 
vented and  used  long  before  buildings  were  built, 
as  in  any  form  of  what  we  call  decoration. 

But  we  delight  in  finding  some  such  arrange- 
ment in  the  face  of  nature  herself;  we  choose 
our  place  for  looking  at  her  features ;  we  place 
ourselves  so  as  to  emphasize  some  of  these  ab- 
stract properties  of  things ;  we  so  place  ourselves 


SmCERITT  213 

that  we  can  most  feel  certain  curves,  certain  per- 
pendiculars, certain  horizontals,  certain  arrange- 
ments of  triangular  spaces.  For  a  rough  example, 
in  looking  at  a  waterfall,  we  may  choose  some 
place  whence  we  can  feel  the  under  curve  and 
the  masses  of  the  upper  wave,  their  curves  and 
breaking,  and  the  return  curves  of  the  splashing 
water.  We  may  take  into  our  sight  a  tall  clifE 
or  a  tree  on  one  side ;  so  as  to  have  the  illusion 
of  depth  or  height  increased.  And  so  for  any 
other  choice.  Our  way  of  looking  at  things  is 
composition.  So  that  it  might  be  said  that  we 
compose  in  our  very  way  of  looking  at  nature, 
without  ever  thinking  of  any  copy,  any  imita- 
tion of  this  appearance  of  nature  in  art.  And 
we  say  that  this  or  that  is  more  beautiful,  mean- 
ing that  beauty  is  the  thing  that  we  love,  as  it 
takes  form  for  us,  through  our  choice. 

The  following  of  this  detection  of  a  plan,  which 
in  its  extreme  shape,  a  sort  of  grammatical  analy- 
sis, gives  us  the  Moorish  geometric  decoration, 
leads  us  to  seek  also  for  what  we  call  the  line ; 
meaning  the  ornamental  line  which  we  think  we 


214  LECTURE  VI 

discover,  and  which  we  discover  for  the  purpose 
of  bringing  what  we  see  a  little  closer  to  a  de- 
sign; that  is  to  say,  in  the  original  meaning  of 
the  word  design,  an  intention,  a  purpose,  a  hu- 
man arrangement  of  the  present  for  the  future. 
The  more  strongly  we  feel  this,  the  more  im- 
portant the  result  of  our  work;  because  all  the 
more  does  it  insist  upon  that  primal  intention 
of  reducing  nature  to  art.  That  is  to  say,  of 
insisting  upon  the  law  and  order  implied,  — a 
law  not  always  apparent  in  a  world  full  of  acci- 
dents which  we  cannot  reduce  to  order. 

Compare  the  fateful  look  of  one  of  Millet's 
figures,  with  the  accidental,  haphazard  appear- 
ance of  a  figure  of  what  might  be  the  same 
peasant  doing  the  same  thing,  in  the  work  of 
smaller  artists  —  if  indeed  it  be  quite  fair  to  com- 
pare them,  because  not  seldom  the  weakness  of 
observation  runs  through  every  detail  of  the  paint- 
ing of  the  smaller  man. 

Not  seldom  the  peasant  himself,  the  theme  of 
the  picture,  does  not  make  his  traditional  gestures 
in  a  full  and  complete  manner :  as  also,  not  sel- 


SINCERITY  215 

dom,  does  the  animal  (who  is,  however,  yet  nearer 
to  the  law  of  nature)  step  poorly,  stand  poorly, 
make  a  deficient  equation.  The  reign  of  accident, 
of  contradiction,  runs  into  and  interferes  with  the 
government  of  law  which  we  are  looking  for. 
Notice  how  in  the  reflection  of  the  world  of  sound 
by  the  art  of  music,  the  musician  does  not  seek 
to  represent  its  possible  violations,  its  breaks  of 
harmony. 

So  that  Millet  turned  one  day  to  a  friend  and 
said,  "  Do  you  do  this  motion  for  me.  The  peas- 
ants here  cannot  carry  it  out  as  it  should  be. 
The  lines  they  make  do  not  fill  anything." 
Whenever  I  look  upon  the  engraving  of  the  draw- 
ing which  he  then  made,  I  have  the  satisfaction  of 
a  standing  lesson  upon  what  composition  means.^ 

The  hand  of  which  we  have  spoken  as  having 
a  memory  of  its  own,  follows  these  lines  of  our 
choice,  until  at  length,  almost  of  its  own  accord, 
it  traces  curves,  and  divides  spaces  which  recall 
the  order  that  we  call  ornament.  All  of  you 
know  this  more  or  less,  and  you  also  know  that 
even  when  your  mind  knows,  the  hand  will  not 

1  The  engraving  (on  wood)  is  by  Mr.  Pierre  Millet,  upon  his 
brother's  lines,  and  represents  a  ditcher. 


216  LECTURE  VI 

always  obey.  We  have  been  speaking  of  compo- 
sition, and  you  see  that  the  detection  of  its  exist- 
ence in  our  impressions  of  nature  accompanies 
more  or  less  all  full  artistic  sight.  Roughly  we 
can  determine  some  of  the  preferences  of  its  laws. 
The  whole  world  of  ornamental  art  is  based  upon 
them.  In  our  more  plastic  arts  the  geometric  law 
is  more  difficult  to  disentangle ;  because  our  arts 
include  the  representation  of  that  part  of  exte- 
rior nature  where  accident  has  its  place  more  dis- 
tinctly ;  where  the  energies  of  animal  life  may  be 
part  of  the  picture ;  where  moral  and  intellectual 
life  may  be  implied.  For  remember  that  for  us, 
just  now,  nature  is  all  that  is  outside  of  our  inner- 
most, unanalyzed  self,  and  that  the  moral  life  ex- 
pressed in  living  beings  is  nature  for  us  just  as 
truly  as  plant  life  or  crystallization  of  minerals. 

You  will  have  remembered  and  kept  steadily  in 
mind  our  considerations  when  we  have  paused  for 
a  time  in  the  discussion  of  memories  of  education, 
of  training,  of  rule  given  to  us  from  without,  and 
their  entanglement  with  the  memories  collected 
by  ourselves,  either  in  the  remote  or  the  imme- 


SINCERITY  217 

diate  past.  We  have  also  dwelt  upon  the  confu- 
sion in  the  work  of  art  of  methods  of  interpretation 
belonging  to  different  memorial  systems.  Such 
confusions  are  extremely  frequent;  they  can  be 
lived  through,  it  is  true,  by  a  strong  personality, 
by  one  who  feels  the  fundamental  rule,  namely, 
that  all  methods  are  man's  property,  that  methods 
are  for  art,  not  art  for  methods.  Yet  his  needs  are 
not  necessarily  yours,  and  if  you  have  the  least 
choice  you  cannot  employ  his  without  bringing 
out  more  fully  in  your  work  this  irrational,  contra- 
dictory side  which  may  be  all  right  in  the  world 
of  chance,  but  not  in  the  logical,  balanced  world 
of  art.  Strange  to  say,  some  of  the  greatest 
blunders,  some  of  the  greatest  annoyances  of 
sight,  have  been  brought  about  by  this  error,  this 
want  of  comprehension,  have  come  in  just  where 
their  authors  were  encouraged  to  feel  that  they 
had  been  obeying  the  law,  —  nay,  were  proud  and 
self-righteous  about  their  obedience,  or  rather  their 
testimony,  and  considered  that  knowing  that  they 
had  the  true  faith,  they  had  but  to  keep  to  the 
rule  and  shut  their  eyes. 


218  LECTURE  VI 

But  though  m  this  they  were  not  different  from 
many  of  other  schools,  who  also  think  that  the 
conscience  of  their  own  eyes  need  no  longer  be 
considered,  —  they  and  all  are  in  risk  who  forget 
that  in  art  there  is  no  collective  salvation.  Its 
theology  is  as  cruel  as  that  mediaeval  view  of  the 
future  which  made  Dante  place  popes  and  priests 
in  the  singing  flames  of  the  Inferno. 

And  each  man  is  judged  by  himself. 

You  will  remember  that  I  referred,  in  a  pre- 
vious lecture,  to  the  evidences  in  the  work  of 
certain  painters  which  prove  that  they  retain  a 
memory  of  colourless  representations  —  or  per- 
haps I  ought  to  say  of  black  and  white  represen- 
tations —  of  nature,  within  their  other  memories 
of  the  dress  that  nature  always  assumes,  which 
is  a  coloured  one.  We  called  up  our  recollec- 
tions of  paintings  which  looked  as  if  studied 
from  plaster  casts  or  statues,  and  of  paintings 
that  represent  movement  fixed  and  frigid  as  the 
cast;  of  paintings  wherein  are  preserved  methods 
of  black  and  white  memories  ;  of  engraving,  of 
drawing  with  pencil  or  with  crayon ;  of   paint- 


SINCERITY  219 

ings  where  the  entire  surface,  even  the  move- 
ment of  the  brush,  transfers  to  your  eye  the 
sensation,  not  of  a  vacillating  coloured  atmos- 
phere, but  of  the  steady,  measurable  world  that 
lives  in  engravings.  We  made  out  the  causes 
to  have  been  the  persisting  memories  of  things 
already  made  within  the  immediate  memories  of 
things  seen.  It  was  useless  to  go  further  and 
to  imply  that  the  colourless  representation  is  an 
easier  and  more  measurable  —  more  commercial 
—  manner  of  carrying  out  the  form,  the  appear- 
ance of  a  painting,  so  as  to  make  it  understood 
by  many  or  most — therefore  more  negotiable. 
We  might  also  notice  that,  connected  with  this 
obsession  in  the  way  of  having  the  colourless 
representation,  already  made,  direct  for  us  what 
is  apparently  our  fresh  perception,  we  may  also 
suffer  from  an  obsession  of  arrangements  —  of 
composition  as  it  is  called,  by  which  we  single 
out  certain  arrangements,  certain  divisions,  that 
we  have  already  seen  made  artificially,  and  seek 
to  impose  them  upon  the  face  of  nature,  —  either 
that  nature   which   we    see   at   the   moment,  or 


220  LECTURE  VI 

the  nature  which  we  see  in  our  minds,  and 
which  is  the  memory  of  outside  perceptions. 
For  example,  there  was  a  time  when  the  very 
landscape  painter,  apparently,  forced  the  arrange- 
ment of  what  he  saw  into  a  set  mould  already 
provided.  Or  else — and  it  has  lingered  to  our 
day  —  he  arranged  what  we  call  his  imagined 
pictures  into  some  similarly  conventional  division 
of  light  and  shade,  for  instance,  or  of  distribution 
of  masses. 

Nor  can  we  think  that  we  can  escape  from 
such  a  fate  merely  because,  in  the  studying  out 
of  the  necessary  realism  of  our  made-up  pictures, 
we  feel  confident  that  we  have  only  recorded,  as 
far  as  distribution  at  least,  the  impressions  of 
the  moment.  And  in  such  a  matter  as  this 
I  feel  quite  sure  that  for  all  of  you  who  may 
be  passionately  fond  of  realism,  who  may  delight 
in  the  thing  as  it  is,  who  may  avoid  too  much 
thought,  for  fear  of  endangering  what  you  think 
is  not  thought,  but  impression,  I  may  be  sug- 
gesting a  valuable  caution. 

Those  of  you  who  are  as  fond  of  the  extraor- 


SINCERITY  221 

dinary  work  of  Menzel  the  German  as  I  am ; 
who,  like  myself  for  the  last  forty  years  or  so, 
have  followed  with  sympathy  this  very  modern 
worker,  may  still  have  noticed  how  conventional, 
how  artificial,  is,  very  often,  the  framing  —  if  I 
may  so  call  it  —  of  light  and  shade,  or  the  arrange- 
ment of  groups  within  which  are  included  studies 
that,  seen  at  a  proper  distance,  make  the  photo- 
graph look  careless  in  observation.  Evidently, 
with  such  a  man,  this  is  the  fragment  of  past 
early  education  which  he  has  carried  all  along, 
which  is  not  his  own,  which  perhaps  he  may 
not  see. 

In  colour  also  there  have  been  practices  sup- 
posed to  be  principles,  —  practices  which  were 
evidently  based  on  the  memory  of  some  successful 
momentary  arrangement. 

I  do  not  know  whether  any  one  still  remains 
who  learned  the  principle  of  what  used  to  be 
called  the  brown  tree  ;  but  those  of  us  who  have 
known  painters  of  the  beginning  of  this  century, 
or  of  the  end  of  the  last,  can  remember  that 
there  was  a  dictum  of  the  studios  which  stood 


222  LECTURE  VI 

in  the  way  of  newer  attempts  that  now  them- 
selves seem  conventional,  —  attempts  at  intro- 
ducing the  unbroken  prevalence  of  tones  like 
the  greys  and  greens  of  trees  and  herbage. 
Therein,  at  one  time,  the  connoisseur  required 
that  some  patch  of  brown,  of  warm  colour,  some 
brown  tree  in  a  landscape,  should  restore  the 
balance  —  suggest  what  we  can  now  understand 
to  have  been  some  feeling  for  complementary 
colour. 

The  composition  of  colour  in  painting  is  a 
matter  so  important  —  I  mean  that  scheme  of 
affecting  the  eye  and  the  mind  which  has  been 
so  beautifully  used  by  great  and  little  artists  — 
that  I  dare  only  refer  to  it.  One  side  of  the 
question,  however,  has  always  struck  me  as  un- 
explained, and  that  is  that  the  succession,  the 
inheritance  of  such  means  has  been  with  us  in 
the  West  always  broken ;  while  in  the  East  the 
tradition  of  the  balances  and  adjustments  of 
colour  seems  to  remain  uninterrupted. 

It  is  not  that  I  cannot  perceive  the  possible 
influence   of  the   struggle   in   the  West  between 


SINCERITY  223 

that  tendency  which  took  form  in  the  Greek 
and  the  opposite  tendency  which  seems  to  have 
been  the  genius  of  the  northern  races.  A  certain 
something  came  to  bloom  around  the  Mediter- 
ranean, rapidly,  within  a  few  lifetimes ;  and  ever 
since  the  world  of  the  West  has  felt  the  power 
more  or  less.  The  Greek  moved  in  the  moving 
breath  of  the  World.  With  him  art  was  fluid ; 
but  though  his  influence  permeated  the  northern 
world,  always  that  world  protested,  returned  to 
something  set  as  soon  as  possible,  returned  to 
arbitrary,  savage,  symbolic  formulating,  to  pat- 
terns instead  of  the  reality,  to  what  looks  like 
archaism.  It  is  not  strictly  barbarism ;  it  is  a 
holding-on  to  antique  ways.  The  savage  is  con- 
ventional on  principle,  and  often  on  religious  prin- 
ciple. This  opposition  persisted,  perhaps,  far  into 
the  Middle  Ages,  and  the  turn  of  mind  which 
I  am  considering  on  several  sides  to-day  may 
be  an  atavistic  survival. 

In  certain  great  painters  —  I  might  say  it 
also  of  smaller  ones,  but  I  am  thinking  of 
Titian,  of  Veronese,  of  Rubens,  of  Delacroix — 


224  LECTURE  VI 

the  arrangement  of  colour  has  a  similar  effect 
in  the  painting  to  the  arrangement  of  notes  in 
music ;  it  is  an  arrangement  of  voluntary  repeti- 
tion, of  harmonizing  which  is  not  hidden  behind 
the  apparent  mere  representation  of  the  fact.  All 
the  more,  then,  does  it  affect  the  mind,  by  sug- 
gesting, as  music  does,  a  certain  direction  of 
our  feelings.  The  turn  which  the  artist  wishes 
us  to  give  to  the  mood  in  which  we  shall  look 
upon  his  work,  our  indulgence  in  the  feelings 
of  joy,  of  sorrow,  of  sadness,  or  of  triumph,  has 
therefore  been  called,  perhaps  not  inaptly,  the 
orchestration  of  colour.  This  is  rare  among  paint- 
ers of  the  modems  who  may  have  every  excuse 
for  not  utilizing  this  tremendous  force;  because 
the  faces,  the  sides  of  their  interest  in  what  they 
represent,  may  be  so  wrapped  up  in  the  accidental 
details  of  nature,  in  the  chance  happenings  of  light 
and  shade,  of  expression,  of  dramatic  action,  of 
place,  that  these  more  arbitrary  intentions  might 
count  too  much  —  count  too  much  as  they  are  able 
to  control  them.  I  say  able  to  control  them,  be- 
cause, with  most  of  the  greater  men,  even  of  those 


SINCERITY  225 

who  have  not  visibly  used  this  architectonic 
scheme,  there  is  at  least  no  contradiction  to  its 
principles,  and  very  often  a  strong  suggestion 
of  their  having  been  felt. 

But  why  is  it  so  extremely  rare  among  archi- 
tects, or  among  the  artists  of  decoration,  to  whom 
especially  these  principles,  even  if  only  felt  in 
the  blindest  way,  have  given,  at  certain  times, 
a  power  of  affecting  the  mind,  which  with  the 
scale  of  their  means  is  tremendous  when  compared 
with  the  smaller  effects,  that  the  weaker  and 
smaller,  though  more  intellectual,  methods  of 
painting  and  sculpture  can  merely  hint  at.  In 
the  past  the  architect  has  given  a  golden  glow 
to  the  interior,  to  lift  you  up  into  the  New  Jeru- 
salem ;  has  made  his  walls  sombre  with  black 
marble;  has  greyed  them  with  stone  that  was 
neutral;  has  made  his  building  clear-minded  — 
if  one  may  so  say.  And  what  shall  we  say  of 
the  whiter  material,  which  is  intellectual  when  it 
emphasizes  fine  thought,  commonplace  and  courte- 
ous when  it  is  used  for  average  expression  ?  Now 
why  do  we  use  all  these  things  haphazard  to-day  ? 


226  LECTURE  VI 

One  man  likes  this,  another  that,  as  if  he  were 
some  little  lady  anxious  about  being  in  the 
fashion,  and  willing  to  go  even  against  her 
complexion,  provided  she  do  nothing  that  others 
do  not  do.  And  at  length  architecture,  the  means 
of  largest  importance  that  we  can  use,  takes 
on  a  dress  of  triviality;  like  the  madonnas  of 
southern  countries,  dressed  in  paper  and  satin, 
with  real  costly  diamonds,  perhaps.  But  that 
is  relatively  excusable. 

I  was  thinking,  a  moment  ago,  of  the  extreme 
dignity  of  architecture  as  illustrated  by  a  saying 
of  Delacroix,  —  that  a  great  architect  was  rarer 
than  rare,  and  consequently  held  the  very  highest 
rank  as  an  artist ;  because  he  had  to  find  beauty 
in  what  is  most  irrelevant,  —  usefulness. 

These  were  not  the  sequences  I  was  thinking 
of,  however,  when  I  left  off  speaking  about  the 
mechanical  influence  of  ideas  of  composition. 
Our  processes,  the  processes  of  modem  painters, 
are  complicated,  both  in  observation  and  execu- 
tion. You  know  that  the  modem  painter,  in  the 
development  of  specialty,  has  long  lost  the  clue 


SINCERITY  227 

of  his  relations  to  decorative  art,  to  work  done 
in  large  buildings  for  fixed  places,  which  work  is 
to  be  lit  as  the  walls  happen  to  be  lit,  not  to  be 
carried  about  from  building  to  building  or  from 
room  to  room,  in  a  portable  gilt  frame.  Among 
the  painters  or  designers  who  have  tried  to  take 
up  this  lost  thread  of  connection  with  architecture, 
there  was  for  a  time,  there  is  still,  a  fear  of 
abandoning  some  clearly  stated  and  commonplace 
basis  of  arrangement ;  for  instance,  a  method  of 
putting  something  in  the  middle  to  emphasize 
the  feeling  of  a  perpendicular,  and  then  something 
on  each  side  to  recall,  perhaps,  the  case  of  divid- 
ing the  remaining  halves  by  some  suggestion  of 
a  diagonal :  that  is,  the  pyramidal  composition 
of  the  books  and  of  the  schoolboy  in  art.  But 
Raphael  did  it,  —  and  so  did  Homer  write  in 
hexameters.  Which  is  the  important  thing,  the 
hexameter  or  the  Homer?  It  is  just  Raphael's 
beautiful  way  of  escaping  the  suggestion  of 
grammar  which  is  his  charm.  What  you  feel, 
as  you  look  at  his  work,  is  the  poetic  feeling, 
the  splendour  of  movement  of  the  limbs,  and  all 


228  LECTURE   VI 

the  freer  composition  which  has  covered  the 
original,  simple  programme. 

To  save  his  statement  of  such  arrangements, 
to  keep  their  arbitrary  nature,  to  prevent  your 
forgetting  that  he  was  a  licensed  grammarian, 
who  had  passed  examinations,  the  modern  painter 
or  draughtsman  was  obliged  to  give  to  his  figures, 
and  other  objects  represented,  a  greater  stiffness 
than  he  saw  in  nature,  and  thus  another  distortion 
of  memories  became  and  is  still  a  habit.  To 
think  only  of  just  so  much  and  no  more,  in  look- 
ing at  nature,  then  wilfully  to  remember  some 
ancient  way  of  doing  which  seemed  both  imperfect 
and  abstract  (and  about  that  I  shall  have 
something  more  to  say),  to  continue  artificially 
these  contradictory  memories  —  for  we  cannot 
fully  control  the  memory  of  actual  sight  —  this 
became  the  mechanism.  Now,  perhaps,  of  all 
things  it  is  most  difficult  not  to  remember;  to 
forget  deliberately  while  one  is  receiving  im- 
pressions. Were  I  told  that  it  is  impossible,  I 
should  not  contradict. 

And  another  difficulty  came  in  the  way:   the 


SINCERITY  229 

older  methods  and  appearances  of  representation 
were  all  synthetic,  not  analytic ;  were  all  more 
or  less  in  the  manner  of  that  fish  outline  which 
I  spoke  of  as  done  by  the  savage,  —  all  that  he 
can  do;  not  an  elegant,  civilized  choice.  This 
for  both  drawing,  as  we  call  it  —  that  is  to  say^ 
choice  of  synthetic  outline  —  and  also  for  model- 
ling and  for  colouring.  Consequently  the  modern 
aesthete  usually  produced  an  unthinkable  equation, 
His  figures  looked  like  the  sections  of  an  archi- 
tect's work ;  for  had  he  not  tried  to  believe  in 
the  possibility  of  a  single  outline  ?  And  his  col-- 
ours  were  applications  upon  that  interior  section. 

Note  that  we  have  seen  the  same  sad  blunder 
in  the  bas-reliefs  which  are  modelled  upon  the 
outline  of  a  section. 

I  have  quoted  a  criticism  —  a  criticism  by  a 
child  —  of  this  modern  method,  in  a  paper  pub- 
lished  last  July  in  The  Century  Magazine.  It  ran 
this  way:  "The  light  of  truth  fell  upon  the 
subject  from  the  words  of  a  child  who  had  been 
listening  to  a  talk  in  which  I,  and  others  wiser 
than   myself,  were  trying  to  follow  out   certain 


280  LECTURE  VI 

boundaries  which  outlined  true  methods  of  deco- 
rative art,  and  which  kept  to  the  received  in- 
structions of  abstention  from  this  and  that,  of 
refraining  from  such  and  such  a  reality,  of 
stiffening  the  flow  of  outline,  of  flattening  the 
fulness  of  modelling,  of  turning  our  backs  on 
light  and  shade ;  —  of  almost  hating  the  face  of 
nature ;  and  we  wondered  that  when  our  Euro- 
pean exemplars  of  to-day  had  fulfilled  every 
condition  of  conventionality,  had  carefully  avoided 
the  use  of  the  full  methods  of  art  in  the  great 
specialties  of  painting  and  sculpture,  their  glo- 
rious work  had  less  stuff  to  it  than  a  Gothic  floral 
ornament  or  a  Japanese  painted  fan.  *  Father,* 
said  the  child,  *  are  you  not  all  making  believe  ? 
Is  the  Japanese  richness  in  their  very  flat  work 
so  different  from  what  you  can  see  in  this  sketch 
by  my  little  brother?  See  how  his  tree  looks  as 
if  it  had  light  and  shadow,  and  yet  he  has  used 
no  modelling.  He  has  used  only  these  markings 
of  the  tree  and  their  variation  of  colour  to  do 
for  both.  He  has  left  out  nothing,  and  yet  it 
is  flat  painting.* " 


SINCERITY  231 

Nor  have  the  great  workmen  of  the  past,  even 
the  Egyptian,  the  painters  of  the  Greek  vases,  left 
out  things.  The  draughtsman  like  Caran  d'Ache, 
the  caricaturist,  solves  the  difficulty  in  the  same 
way,  by  the  most  decided  use  of  synthesis,  by 
making  his  line  again  like  that  of  the  savage  — 
by  implying  colour  and  form  and  modelling  and 
perspective  in  his  line.  But  this  is  a  personal 
method,  impossible  to  teach  by  analysis,  or  we 
should  all  study  for  it,  and  do  it,  too  happy  in 
getting  to  the  end  at  once,  which  end  is  to  express 
what  you  care  for  most  by  the  simplest  means 
that  will  avail  you  —  your  personality,  your 
knowledge,  your  experience;  whether  you  do  it 
in  work  that  takes  years,  or  whether  you  do  it, 
like  Caran  d'Ache,  in  the  line  of  a  few  seconds. 

In  the  division  of  our  subject  that  we  last  dwelt 
on,  we  can  discern  the  dangerous  use  of  a  merely 
analytic  method  in  creative  work.  There  is  this 
danger,  though  none  of  us  would  like  to  avoid  it, 
of  much  knowledge  in  certain  matters  which  can 
be  used  in  artistic  representation,  that  they  are 
assumed  to  be  the  objects  of  artistic  representation. 


232  LECTURE  Vl 

The  object  of  artistic  representation  is  not  your 
knowledge,  but  your  way  of  using  knowledge. 
Certain  learnings  of  form,  for  instance,  such  as 
are  possessed  by  the  anatomist,  have  often  been  a 
something  between  the  things  we  see  and  our- 
selves. And  this  difficulty  is  based  on  so  honour- 
able a  prejudice  that  it  is  only  when  we  have  so 
mastered  our  knowledge,  great  or  little,  that  in 
comparison  with  our  great  fund  of  ignorance  it 
seems  but  a  trifle,  —  when  we  again  become  our- 
selves, as  it  were,  —  that  we  can  truly  be  free  of 
it  and  use  it. 

Looking  at  the  subject  from  another  point  of 
view,  if  we  were  perfectly  honest  and  gave  our 
knowledge  pure  and  simple,  and  nothing  more,  as 
being  perfectly  honest,  we  should  still  be  perfectly 
artistic.  We  should  express  ourselves  in  that 
direction.  Who  has  ever  felt  distressed  as  an 
artist  by  anatomical  plates  which  described  any- 
thing that  he  wished  to  know  ?  As  long  as  every- 
thing about  them  was  carried  out  for  no  other 
purpose  than  instruction  of  that  one  kind,  has 
the  most  sensitive  eye  ever  felt  a  want  of  taste 


SINCERITY  233 

in  them?  Is  anything  more  beautiful  than  the 
drawings  which  accompany  certain  purely  scien- 
tific books  of  botany  —  those  in  which  nothing 
but  the  idea  of  the  plant,  the  leaf,  the  flower,  is 
expressed?  The  beautiful  arrangement  and  com- 
position involved  in  nature's  constructions  cannot 
be  more  honestly  suggested. 

Now  suppose  that  the  professor  of  botany  should 
imagine  that  he  has  what  the  French  call  a  charm- 
ing talent  for  painting ;  for  the  representation  of 
light  and  air,  for  the  finest  variations  of  colour, 
for  all  that  is  evanescent,  fluctuating,  irreducible 
to  a  set  of  lectures  in  botany ;  and  then  that  upon 
these  knowledges  he  places  the  appearance  of 
things  which  —  and  notice  this  with  extreme  care 
—  is,  both  in  nature  and  in  art,  a  statement  that 
we  don't  see  everything  that  we  know.  Unless 
our  man  is  at  least  as  good  a  painter  as  he  is  bot- 
anist, —  I  had  almost  said  a  better,  — there  will  be 
a  veil  of  misstatement  of  fact  floating  in  front  of 
his  record  of  knowledge. 

Many  a  time,  when  looking  from  the  sea  into 
the  interior  of   some  island  of  the  South  Seas,  I 


234  LECTURE  VI 

have  tried  to  guess  at,  to  analyze  the  plan  of  the 
mysterious  intricacy  of  mountain-lines  confused  in 
the  ancient  volcano-centres  around  which  the 
islands  are  built.  With  each  motion  of  the  ship 
or  of  the  whale-boat,  these  lines  played  one  into 
the  other ;  edges  of  great  slopes,  smooth  and 
green,  or  broken  with  precipice  and  wreathed  in 
coloured  mist,  that  trembled  in  the  sunshine. 
What  would  I  not  have  given  to  have  their 
map  clear  in  my  head,  like  my  friend  the  captain, 
or  the  engineer  officer  who  accompanied  me. 
And  yet  I  said  to  myself:  "My  friend's  knowl- 
edge of  the  geography  (in  fact,  my  own  knowl- 
edge, if  I  had  the  map  before  my  very  eyes) 
would  only  be  a  help,  and  only  a  help  to  me.  He 
could  not  paint  this  fluctuating  scene,  the  light, 
the  colour,  all  the  things  by  which,  through  which, 
the  scene  was  there." 

This  knowledge  of  a  map  would  have  been  an 
abstraction,  an  idea  perfectly  well  represented  by 
the  fact  that  I  could  have  looked  down  on  the 
black  and  white  lines  which  made  this  image  of 
an  abstraction,  all  dotted  with  figures  of  heights. 


SINCERITY  235 

streaked  with  long  Polynesian  names,  —  Oropaa, 
Tautira,  TevS,  Porioniiu,  names  full  of  historical 
and  legendary  association,  —  while  the  image  that 
I  saw  before  me  blazing  in  the  sunlight  had  no 
legendary  meaning,  had  no  heights  marked  upon 
it  —  was,  conversely  to  the  flattened  map,  more 
like  a  vast  curtain  of  lit-up  cloud  hung  between 
the  sky  and  sea.  Would  the  fact  that  I  knew  the 
height  in  numbers  of  feet  of  the  great  waterfall 
that  crawled  down  the  cliff,  help  me  to  give  its 
many  motions,  or  the  glistening  rainbow  cloud 
that  hid  its  path  half  down? 

And  do  not  let  us  forget  what  I  put  in  as  a  sort 
of  parenthesis,  a  few  moments  ago :  in  painting, 
in  painting  more  especially  than  in  drawing,  but 
in  drawing  also,  in  every  form  more  or  less,  in 
every  form  of  art  which  represents  any  part  of 
our  record  of  sight,  one  of  the  most  important 
elements  is  a  record  of  our  ignorance ;  a  statement 
that  at  a  certain  place  our  sight  was  confused, 
that  one  thing  intervened  to  prevent  our  seeing 
another.  It  matters  not  whether  that  one  thing  be 
an  actual  object  that  I  can  take  hold  of,  —  a  rock, 


236  LECTURE  VI 

a  tree,  or  a  wall ;  or  a  mere  veil  of  mist,  a  glanc- 
ing of  light,  the  interference  of  one  shine  of  colour 
with  another,  the  fact  that  my  eyes*  range  has 
stopped  at  a  certain  distance,  at  a  certain  angle, 
in  the  same  way  as  the  furthest  range  of  a  tele- 
scope is  still  limited.  Therefore,  we  painters  rep- 
resent, as  I  think  I  said  before,  not  only  what  we 
see,  but  what  we  do  not  see ;  without  that  involu- 
tion there  is  no  such  thing  as  painting.  I  re- 
member how  a  well-known  oculist,  who  had  little 
experience  with  painters,  tested  the  sight  of  a 
patient  who  was  an  artist.  He  was  surprised  at 
the  artist's  avoiding  the  traps  that  are  laid  to 
detect  defects  in  sight,  and  at  the  artist's  power  of 
describing  and  analyzing  what  he  saw,  what  he 
thought  he  saw,  and  what  he  felt  he  saw  indis- 
tinctly or  with  uncertainty.  Said  the  doctor,  "  I 
have  only  two  cases  of  eyes  with  worse  defects 
than  yours,  but  I  have  never  met  any  one  who 
seemed  to  see  so  correctly." 

"  That,"  answered  the  artist,  "  is  my  profession. 
My  profession  is  to  see  correctly." 

It  is  this  difficulty  of  the  learned  man  that  con- 


smcEBiTY  237 

fuses  the  mind  of  the  small  child.  He  too  stag- 
gers through  the  world,  on  his  little  legs,  laden 
with  the  enormous  responsibility  of  the  knowledge 
he  has  acquired.  Look  at  his  drawing;  he  has 
got  a  face  turned  half  away ;  he  has  put  one  eye 
in  it,  but  he  knows  there  is  another.  Where  is  he 
to  put  that  eye  —  that  extra  eye  ?  He  has  to  get 
it  in  somehow  or  other;  and  he  will  put  two  on 
the  same  side  of  the  face,  rather  than  go  against 
his  knowledge ;  which,  as  you  see,  like  all  knowl- 
edge, is  imperfect.  Over  and  over  again,  the  child 
worries  about  the  representation  of  the  windows 
on  the  other  side  of  the  house,  about  what  is  hap- 
pening inside ;  and  I  have  seen  drawings  in  which 
a  child,  troubled  by  the  fact  of  the  two  legs  of 
a  man,  which  legs  are  on  either  side  of  a  horse, 
has  made  his  horse  transparent,  so  that  you  can 
see  the  other  leg.  Otherwise,  to  him,  it  was  a 
one-legged  man. 

There  is,  in  that  small  compass,  again  the  phi- 
losophy of  all  our  systems  of  representation.  You 
see  the  difficulty  that  the  child  has  in  separating 
his  thinking  from  his  sight.     He  has,  perhaps,  by 


238  LECTURE  VI 

the  time  that  he  begins  to  draw,  a  very  keen,  a  very 
delicate  sight.  As  long  as  the  colours  that  he  sees 
can  be  used  for  use,  —  for  eating  the  fruit,  we  will 
say,  for  catching  the  bird,  for  knowing  where  the 
eggs  are,  —  he  makes  no  mistake ;  though  —  if  the 
scientific  Mr.  Gladstone  will  forgive  me  —  he  can- 
not name  the  colours  which  he  uses  any  better 
than  you  or  I,  for  the  purposes  just  mentioned.  It 
is  only  when  he  has  to  represent  to  himself  the 
action  of  these  colours  upon  himself,  that,  as  we 
have  seen,  he  becomes  confused  as  to  what  is 
asked  of  him.  I  have  known  children  quite  un- 
happy at  finding  these  difficulties,  and  relieved  at 
having  this  weight  of  knowledge  placed  for  them 
where  it  should  belong.  The  child  has  explained 
to  us  this  cause  of  error ;  he  can  also  show  us 
again  what  we  have  been  considering,  —  the  main 
intention  of  the  work  of  art.  When  before  he 
knows  how  to  write  or  draw,  perhaps  when  he 
first  makes  marks  on  the  paper,  he  hands  you  an 
unrelated  scribble,  and  says,  "Papa,"  or  "Mamma, 
this  is  a  letter  to  say  that  I  love  you,"  there  is 
the  work  of  art  in  its   first  intention.     And  so 


SINCERITY  239 

when  later  (if  he  have  the  tendency  inherited 
from  Heaven  knows  how  far  back,  nor  how  near) 
he  plunges  rashly  into  drawing,  like  the  savage, 
he  often  makes  a  synthesis  before  which  many  an 
artist  will  pause,  in  admiration  at  the  number  of 
impressions  co-ordinated  in  some  single  line.  He 
is  really,  at  that  moment,  further  advanced  than 
when  he  becomes  a  student,  and  is  obliged,  by 
slow  analysis,  to  separate  all  these  impressions,  to 
learn  what  they  are  the  sign  of;  to  accumulate 
notions  of  the  different  schemes  of  facts  behind 
them ;  the  botany,  the  geology,  the  anatomy  that 
we  artists  never  know  enough  of ;  to  go  through 
the  never-ending  accumulation  of  memories  of  the 
use  of  materials ;  the  aesthetic  systems  into  which 
he  is  forced ;  the  contradictory  admirations  which 
entangle  him;  perhaps  even  such  considerations 
as  I  am  now  obliging  you  to  weigh.  I  have  seen 
the  process  begin  very  early  with  children ;  I  have 
now,  in  corners  and  tucked  away,  drawings  by 
children  which  represent  boats  and  ships  moving 
with  the  wind,  and  seen  in  various  perspectives ; 
carried,  also,  by  the  motion  of  the  waves ;    all 


240  LECTURE  VI 

with  an  impression  of  nature  and  a  relative  accu- 
racy admirable  both  to  the  artist  and  to  the  man 
who  knows  about  the  sea  and  ships.  Later,  in 
the  life  of  the  same  children,  the  drawings  that  I 
have  no  longer  show  the  same  ingenuous  character. 
The  ship  is  drawn  in  profile  (in  reality  with  a 
tendency  to  making  a  section) ;  masts  and  yards 
and  rigging  are  accurately  outlined,  as  if  the  little 
draughtsman  were  counting  them  all  over  in  his 
mind,  and  asking  himself  whether  he  remembered 
them  all.  The  impression  of  art  has  disappeared ; 
in  the  case  of  some  children,  never  to  return. 

The  artist  can  hope  that  in  his  fullest  devel- 
opment he  may  become  again  as  a  child ;  and 
that  as  he  looks,  or  we  look,  at  his  work,  it  may 
seem  impossible  to  discriminate  between  what 
is  the  ingenuous  statement  of  ignorance,  and  the 
consummate  synthesis  of  knowledge ;  what  is  the 
frank  and  fresh  record  of  a  momentary  impres- 
sion, and  what  is  the  deliberate  cumulative  state- 
ment of  choice. 

I  am  coming  to  the  end  of  my  reading,  the 
last  one  of  this  series.     You  see  clearly  now  why 


SINCERITY  241 

I  can  say  so  little  in  this  short  space  of  time. 
Any  one  of  my  pupils,  if  really  he  gave  out  what 
he  had  noticed,  could  give  us  much  more  than 
the  details  I  deal  out  to  you  amount  to.  How 
much  more  then,  I,  older  and  having  lived  longer ; 
and  having  longer  memories  of  all  I  have  learned 
and  half  forgotten,  discarded,  reserved,  amended, 
apart  from  what  I  have  believed  that  I  saw 
myself ! 

So  that  I  feel  as  if  the  very  despair  of  the 
case  would  show  us  how  I  can  only  have  pointed 
in  many  directions ;  as  from  the  central  mile- 
stone of  Rome,  the  Roman  ways  passed  into  the 
entire  world.  For  our  subject  is  the  mirroring 
of  the  world  by  the  means  of  our  art. 

We  have  considered  many  directions,  however. 
We  have  seen  of  what  is  composed  our  arsenal 
of  means :  our  memories  of  sight  acquired  from 
others  or  made  by  ourselves. 

We  have  seen,  as  students,  how  absurd  it  is 
to  copy  the  memories  of  others  so  as  to  pass 
them  off  as  our  own;  how  profitable  to  copy 
them  so  as  to  learn  from  them  d^ndi  purify  our  own. 


242  LECTUBB  VI 

We  have  seen  how  it  did  not  matter  if  we 
did  copy  —  provided  we  did  not  copy  the  surface, 
which  is  the  dress  of  another  man. 

Thus  Donatello,  who  was  a  greater  sculptor  and 
artist  than  we  are  likely  to  be,  and  who  is  to-day 
nearer  to  our  own  observations  than  ever,  more 
fresh,  more  original  than  ever,  studied  and  copied 
the  antique.  So  Niccolo  Pisano  was  awakened  by 
copying  the  Roman  Tombs.  So  Raphael,  who 
appropriated  all  of  antiquity  that  he  could,  who 
absorbed  Perugino,  who  learned  from  Fra  Bar- 
tolommeo,  who  imitated  Michael  Angelo.  So 
Michael  Angelo  himself  first  imitated  the  antique. 
So  Rubens,  who  never  forgot  the  Italian,  but  to 
whom  we  refer  as  the  type  of  a  distinctly  different 
national  art.  So  the  architect  of  the  Renaissance, 
who  thought  that  he  was  copying  the  classics. 

I  might  have  decided  many  things  for  you:  I 
might  have  said  that  this  work  of  art  was  right, 
and  that  another  one  was  wrong ;  I  might,  as  the 
Chinese  philosopher  phrased  it,  have  divided  by 
black  and  white,  and  hard  and  fast.  As  a  gen- 
eral, I    might    have   made  war   on   an   enemy's 


SINCEBITT  243 

country,  and  spared  none  but  my  friends.  I 
might  perhaps  have  shown  you  more  distinctly 
that  a  white  thing  is  white,  and  that  a  black 
thing  is  black;  nor  do  I  object  to  doing  so  in 
a  proper  place  and  time ;  for  of  all  things,  what 
we  begin  to  doubt  of  is  the  well-known ;  and  we 
can  never  be  too  sure  that  twice  one  is  two  — 
but  what  is  one  and  what  is  two  ?  I  prefer  go- 
ing through  what  we  might  see  or  what  we  have 
seen,  in  some  sort  of  peregrination,  hoping  to  find 
principles  through  some  way  of  dividing  what 
we  have  seen. 

All  that  older  men  can  give  is  advice,  and  it  is 
only  in  details  that  their  experience  can  serve 
and  be  carried  over  into  the  future. 

Since  our  art  is  composed  of  memories  and 
affected  by  them,  so  the  memories  of  thought, 
outside  of  what  directly  affects  your  handiwork, 
will  either  elevate  or  degrade  it.  So  obscure  and 
unfathomable  are  our  latent  memories,  which 
have  accompanied  our  recording  of  nature,  that 
we  are  unconscious  ourselves  of  their  preponder- 
ating influence    with    each    of    us    individually. 


244  LECTURE  VI 

We  can  discern  occasionally  in  some  work  of 
art,  if  we  happen  to  have  a  clue,  how  much  its 
peculiar  turn,  its  importance,  may  depend  upon 
causes  that  are  not  apparently  included  in  the 
statement  of  its  form.  Nature,  as  we  said,  is 
everything  that  is  outside  of  us,  and  our  views 
and  feelings  about  her  problems  can  be  ex- 
pressed even  in  the  tracing  of  an  outline :  the 
subject,  as  it  is  called  in  catalogues  of  pictures, 
is  merely  the  place  where  we  express  ourselves. 
Remember  what  I  quoted  from  Michael  Angelo's 
talk  to  Francis  of  Holland ;  remember  how,  in 
the  designs  of  Michael  Angelo,  you  feel  that  you 
are  in  presence  of  a  most  serious  mind,  occupied 
with  the  end  of  life.  He  himself  has  lifted  the 
veil  for  us,  in  what  he  has  recorded  of  this  con- 
stant preoccupation.  Dr.  Bode,  the  Director  of 
the  Berlin  Museums,  was  telling  me,  this  autumn, 
of  his  constant  sense  of  Millet's  religious  turn 
of  mind  in  the  noble  drawings  of  plants  and 
flowers,  which  with  other  more  clearly  stated 
expressions  of  moral  attitude,  hang  in  Mr.  Quincy 
Shaw's  wonderful  collection. 


SINCERITT  246 

Sometimes  the  presence  of  strong  feeling  or 
high  thought  behind  the  work  of  art  is  ex- 
pressed in  a  sort  of  contradiction.  It  is  some- 
times the  hidden  cause  of  a  subtle  disturbing 
charm  that  appeals  clearly  only  to  the  few, 
until  its  existence  has  been  long  recognized; 
though  that  very  informing  element  has  affected 
the  looker-on  without  his  separating  it  from  the 
subject  represented.  As  its  absolute  proof  can 
rarely  be  given,  except  from  some  fixed  knowl- 
edge, it  must  often  be  only  a  matter  of  divination 
or  surmise.  Not  so  long  ago,  I  was  speaking  to 
a  sculptor  whose  beautiful  work  is  touched  by  a 
certain  elegance  which  approaches  sadness.  We 
were  admiring  a  beautiful  female  model ;  and  as 
he  described  with  the  enthusiasm  of  the  artist, 
some  particular  delicate  sublety  of  form  that  he 
proposed  to  embody  at  some  future  day,  I  no- 
ticed an  expression  in  his  face  which  made  me 
ask  him,  "What  else  are  you  thinking  of?" 

"Of  the  fact,"  he  said,  "that  all  this  that  I 
am  doing  and  others  are  doing  is  but  the  labour 
of  little  insects,  —  little  living  points  upon   this 


246  LECTURE  VI 

small  speck  of  dirt,  rolling  in  illimitable  space, 
which  we  call  the  earth,  and  which  is  destined 
to  perish  unperceived  in  the  multitude  of 
worlds." 

Let  us  remember  that  among  our  ancestors 
were  Socrates,  the  sculptor,  and  Euripides,  the 
painter.  Last  week,  as  I  looked  over  that  col- 
lection of  Hellenic  paintings  owned  by  Herr 
Graf,  so  many  of  them  mere  perfunctory  trade- 
work,  but  all  full  of  meaning,  for  reasons  of 
historical  association  as  well  as  of  their  methods 
and  technique,  I  pondered  in  divided  reflection. 
Anything  made,  anything  even  influenced  by  that 
little  race  of  artists,  the  Greeks,  brings  back  our 
mind  to  its  first  legitimate,  ever-continuing  ad- 
miration ;  with  them  the  floating  Goddess  of 
Chance  took  ojff  her  sandals  and  remained. 

I  was  amused  at  recognizing,  in  the  work  of 
Alexandrian  or  Egyptian  Greek,  some  traces 
of  method  not  far  removed  from  the  system 
of  touches  which  we  analyzed  in  the  work  of 
Mr.  Bonnat ;  marks  and  scratches  painted  in 
like  memories  of  the  tooling  of  a  oestrum ;   as 


SINCERITY  247 

well  as  the  manner  in  which  the  brush  or  the 
oestrum  moved  in  the  distemper  and  the  wax, 
and  gave  the  direction  of  modelling;  just  as  it 
has  always  been  with  Western  work,  almost  as 
it  is  to-day.  Hardly  a  trace  of  the  vase  outlines 
remained;  the  so-called  modern  idea  of  painting 
by  colour,  not  by  line,  was  there  implied  :  and 
again,  there  is  nothing  new.  The  cestrum  moving 
in  the  wax  was  used  there  as  Euripides,  the  poet, 
used  it,  after  he  had  given  up  the  career  of 
the  athlete  and  had  not  yet  come  to  write  the 
verses  of  which  it  was  said  that  they  were  "  sweet 
as  honey  and  the  song  of  the  Sirens."  And 
Pyrrho,  the  philosopher,  had  also  been  a  painter 
before  he  followed  Alexander  into  the  far  East, 
and  returned  with  memories  of  the  Eastern  con- 
tempt for  the  vain  shadows  of  this  fleeting 
world. 

He  had  met  the  philosophy  of  India,  the 
thought  of  the  East,  and  may  perhaps  have 
heard  from  the  first  Buddhists  the  doctrine  which 
represents  our  life  as  one  of  constant  illusion, 
in  which  nothing  is  safe  to  rest  on,  but  the  small 


248  LECTURE  VI 

momentary  obligations  imposed  by  our  every-day 
relations,  by  pity  towards  others  and  the  ties 
of  daily  duty. 

He  had  lived  not  so  many  years  before  these 
paintings  which  I  was  looking  at  may  have  been 
painted,  and  he,  too,  had  used  the  oestrum  and 
the  hot  irons  and  the  wax.  I  remembered  also 
that  returning  with  the  treasure  of  a  philosophy, 
to  his  native  Elis,  where  he  served  as  high-priest, 
he  passed  his  life  quietly  and  humbly,  helping  the 
sister  with  whom  he  lived  in  household  work, 
carrying  garden  produce  to  market,  and  sweeping 
the  house.  So,  too,  in  the  books  of  an  Eastern 
author,  who  may  have  lived  in  P3Trho's  day,  a 
Chinese  philosopher  and  pupil  of  Laotzu,  I  have 
read  a  story  with  a  similar  moral.  It  is  the  story 
of  the  pupil  of  some  sage,  who  at  length  attains 
Wisdom  and  a  full  comprehension  of  the  law 
of  the  universe,  about  which  he  had  fretted 
for  many  a  day,  anxious  and  uncertain.  Then, 
when  he  has  attained,  as  the  word  is,  he  retires 
to  live  at  home,  in  silence,  in  ordinary  duties; 
sweeps  the  room  and  feeds  the  pigs,  says  the  text, 


SINCERITY  249 

as  if  they  were  human  beings.  I  confess  to  the 
extreme  pleasure  that  I  take  in  thus  bringing  the 
East  and  the  West  together,  in  noting  that  this 
lesson  is  as  modern  as  any  that  I  could  learn; 
that  is  to  say,  that  there  is  little  difference  caused 
by  the  delay  of  a  few  thousand  years,  and  that 
another  colour  of  skin  does  not  affect  the  general 
law. 

And  so  with  us,  pupils  of  wisdom,  the  attain- 
ment of  any  clear  and  high  view  of  our  art; 
the  dwelling  in  regions  of  noble  intention ;  the 
consciousness  of  having  powers  above  the  common, 
require  all  the  more,  as  proofs  of  having  attained, 
that  we  should  have  care  of  small  things;  that 
we  should  cook  the  meals  and  sweep  the  house. 
It  will  be  to  us  the  proof  of  a  sober  certain 
holding  of  the  higher  principles  of  art,  that  we 
care  for  the  small  matters  that  allow  us  to  express 
greater  ones.  For  us  there  can  be  no  details  that 
are  unimportant;  there  can  be  no  art  without 
a  craft.  ("  II  n'y  a  pas  d'art  sans  metier.")  Every- 
thing that  gives  us  a  better  hold  upon  our  humble 
materials,  upon  our  use  of  tools,  will  be  of  con- 


260  LECTURE  VI 

stant  interest.  Our  life  as  workmen  will  never 
be  tedious;  and  we  can  take  a  childlike  and 
healthy  delight  in  our  work  and  its  success;  our 
paints  and  their  preparation,  our  brushes,  our 
canvases,  our  papers  and  varnishes. 

We  shall  be  curious  of  all  methods  that  can 
avail;  undemeaths  and  glazes,  preparations  and 
retouchings.  And  the  experience  of  others  in 
all  such  matters  we  shall  seek  out  and  respect. 
We  cannot  tell  how  important  the  knowledge 
held  by  some  older  workman  may  be.  And  so, 
however  full  our  philosophy  or  lofty  our  imagina- 
tion, we  shall  still  care  for  the  washing  of  our 
brushes — for  the  sweeping  of  the  house. 

Have  you  not  all  been  pleased  as  painters  by 
the  respect  of  the  Dutch  school  for  good  work ; 
for  a  sort  of  honesty  and  good  faith  in  the 
very  material  offered  ?  Can  you  not  picture 
with  approval,  even  though  you  may  smile,  the 
Dutch  painter  of  high  finish,  whose  room  is  as 
cleanly  and  orderly  as  a  laboratory  when  a  test 
experiment  is  being  tried ;  who  abhors  dust  more 
than  any  housekeeper  can  abhor  it;  who  steals 


SINCERITY  261 

on  tiptoe  into  his  studio,  and  almost  withholds 
his  breath  from  disturbing  the  air  about  his 
canvas ;  whose  paints,  whose  varnishes,  are  culled 
from  all  that  the  world  of  experience  can  supply ; 
who  never  loses  a  moment,  and  yet  works  slowly ; 
whose  steps  from  first  to  last  are  all  measured 
and  thought  out ;  and  who  may  even  have,  out- 
side of  this  well-applied  use  of  time  for  art,  some 
other  more  commercial  occupation  ?  That  man 
can  stand  in  any  presence :  before  the  greatest 
of  masters.  Has  he  not  testified  that  nothing 
can  be  too  precious  to  adorn  an  idea  —  that  time 
does  not  exist  in  the  work  of  art  ? 

For  on  one  side  our  art  is  as  humble  as  on 
another  side  it  is  great ;  and  in  this  we  but 
mirror  again  the  world  about  us,  whose  great 
and  small  are  but  expressions  of  momentary 
relation,  are  but  as  plains  and  hills  melting  into 
one  another.  Terms  are  not  final ;  there  is 
nothing  in  all  creation  which  is  not  great; 
nothing  which  is  not  small.  To  carry  out  all 
these  great  ideas,  small  means  are  necessary. 
For  this  all  men   are   not  equally  forceful,  nor 


252  LECTURE  VI 

can  all  men  be  equally  narrowed  into  the  pro- 
jection of  themselves  through  the  obstacles  that 
meet  them  in  the  realization  of  their  ideas,  and 
which  to  men  of  larger  views,  less  obstinate,  too 
sympathetic,  might  often  mean  opposing  truths. 
It  is  possible,  then,  and  I  am  far  from  denying 
or  doubting  it,  that  the  defeated  in  life  are  not 
the  most  to  be  pitied.  If  there  is  one  thing 
more  than  another  that  we  can  learn  itom  the 
ideas  which  we  have  contemplated,  it  is  that 
all  that  is  most  important  is  our  attitude  of 
mind,  and  that  time  is  of  no  consequence. 
When  I  talked  of  failures,  of  carri^res  manquees, 
when  I  deplored  the  destruction  of  such  a  great 
painting  as  Titian's  "  Peter  Martyr,"  when  I  re- 
gretted that  Lionardo,  or  whomsoever  you  wish 
to  name,  had  not  lived  to  carry  out  his  famous 
work,  my  Buddhist  friends  in  Japan  were  used 
to  say  that  these  interrupted  influences  had  con- 
tinued through  other  worlds,  as  they  had  con- 
tinued for  a  time  in  this  one;  that  the  sum  of 
what  we  had  tried  for  here,  or  had  done,  was 
to  be  added  to  what  other  worlds  might  see  us 


SINCERITY  253 

do.  The  fuel  is  consumed,  but  the  fire  may  be 
transmitted,  and  we  know  not  that  it  comes 
to  an  end. 

I  hope  and  believe  that  my  talks  can  have 
done  3^ou,  as  my  students,  no  harm,  even  if  they 
have  done  you  no  great  good. 

Every  time  that  I  speak  to  you  of  what  you 
may  be  doing  at  the  moment,  every  time  that 
I  have  the  actual  to  touch,  I  feel  surer  than  I 
can  be  in  this  process  of  analysis  by  language, 
of  at  least  insinuating  some  knowledge  of  ex- 
perience, some  application  of  principles,  and  of 
not  being  led  to  add  what  you  have  no  use 
for  yet. 

Children  do  not  learn  to  speak  because  taught 
by  professors  of  the  art,  doctors  in  language,  but 
because  they  live  among  people  who  can  them- 
selves speak. 

The  means  I  may  use,  therefore,  may  not  be 
the  best;  the  reasoning  may  be  more  or  less 
faulty.  The  whole  point  is  this :  have  you  per- 
ceived through  my  language  some  ideas  that 
may  help  you;  have   you  been  able  to   look  at 


254  LECTURE  VI 

ideas  already  known  to  you  in  a  newer  and 
fresher  way,  as  we  painters  look  at  our  pictures 
in  the  glass  to  see  them  differently  ? 

"  When  the  fish  is  caught,  what  the  trap  was 
may  be  for  the  moment  forgotten  ;  when  the  game 
is  caught,  the  snare  may  be  forgotten." 

When  the  idea  is  expressed,  the  language  may 
be  ignored.  "But  when,"  thinks  the  artist,  "  shall 
I  find  a  man  to  put  aside  language,  with  whom  I 
may  be  able  to  converse  ?  For  perfect  argument 
does  not  express  itself  in  words." 


APPENDIX 

Notes  and  Memoranda  of  Lessons 

A  YOUNG  man  brings  me  a  painting  which  in 
his  mind  is  a  representation  of  an  idea.  It  is 
"  The  Vengeance  "  or  "  The  Triumph  of  Justice," 
or  something  of  that  sort.  He  explains  to  me 
what  he  means  by  the  different  actions,  and  all 
the  symbolisms  that  he  has  within  the  action  — 
even  to  the  accident  of  his  choosing  the  colours  of 
the  place,  the  scene,  the  figures  and  their  drapery. 

I  understand  it  to  a  certain  extent ;  but  I  assure 
him  that  it  might  be  quite  possible  that  a  man 
should  think,  without  being  out,  that  Justice  is 
not  blue  but  red ;  and  another  man  might  think 
that  both  were  wrong  and  that  Justice  was  green. 

From  that  I  go  on  and  state  to  him  the  main 
question,  namely,  that  the  plastic  arts  —  architect- 
ure on  its  artistic  side,  painting,  sculpture  —  are 
not  the  best  forms  for  explanation  and  develop- 

26& 


256  APPKNDIX 

ment  of  a  moral  and  metaphysical  notion.  From 
their  very  constitution  they  represent,  not  the  ab- 
stract world  which  we  make,  but  the  world  as 
it  is,  out  of  which  we  disengage,  through  morals 
and  metaphysics,  certain  ideas  which  live  only 
in  the  world  of  metaphysics  and  of  morals  ;  they 
do  not  really  live  in  the  actual  world  as  consti- 
tuted by  an  impenetrable  Providence.  It  is  the 
pride  of  morality — the  pride  of  metaphysics 
—  to  disengage  these  ideas  we  think  written  all 
over  everything,  —  in  our  lives,  in  the  things  we 
suffer,  and  in  the  things  we  see. 

There  would  be  no  difficulty  (any  more  than 
there  is  in  meeting  the  ordinary  facts  of  living) 
with  these  deficiencies  of  the  arts,  were  it  not 
for  certain  people  who  have  not  thought  deeply  on 
the  subject,  though  they  may  have  thought  very 
deeply  in  metaphysics  or  in  science  or  in  morals. 
Properly  speaking,  these  deficiencies  are  the 
honour  of  the  arts,  because  they  make  really  a 
full  picture  of  the  world  as  it  is,  without  preju- 
dice. In  them  are  gathered  not  only  these  ab- 
stract ideas  that  we  distinguish  and  draw  out,  but 


NOTES   AND   MEMORANDA  257 

all  the  supplementary  ideas,  all  the  supplementary 
facts  of  this  world;  and  none  of  us  can  tell  how 
much  weight  the  unimportant  and  the  accidental 
may  have  —  how  necessary  to  the  Providence  of 
the  world  are  the  innumerable  unexplainable  con- 
ditions, —  the  small  facts  which  seem  to  contra- 
dict, the  great  things  that  deny,  and  the  use- 
less, cumbersome  filling  in  of  the  entire  universe. 
Hence,  the  Japanese  —  who  looks  at  our  work, 
and  who  himself,  with  his  Chinese  studies,  has 
developed  the  relations  of  what  art  should  rep- 
resent and  can  represent  best  —  is  troubled  by 
our  allegorical  and  metaphysical  representations 
in  art.  He  understands  them  as  far  as  they  make 
a  beautiful  brocade  or  a  beautiful  ornament,  or 
are  clothed  in  fine  human  form  ;  but  to  him  they 
■are  not  thinkable.  He  cannot  see  why  Liberty 
—  an  abstract  idea  —  should  hold  a  torch.  An 
abstract  idea  holding  a  torch,  and  so  lighting  the 
world,  is  to  him  absurd.  The  figure  is  fine,  let 
us  say;  as  a  figure  holding  a  torch  he  doesn't 
object  to  it;  but  as  an  idea  it  is  small — not 
great. 


268  APPENDIX 

He,  on  the  contrary,  resembles  the  Greek,  who 
considered  that  there  were  essences  or  beings  who 
were  properly  in  charge,  and  influentially  power- 
ful in  the  ordering  of  the  world  and  in  taking  care 
of  its  many  divisions,  —  divisions  of  thought ; 
divisions  of  feeling ;  divisions  of  physical  existence. 
These  he  understands.  My  Japanese  friend  under- 
stands Minerva ;  he  understands  the  gods  of  his 
own  religion ;  he  understands  our  saints  —  our 
mediaeval  feeling  for  the  saints;  but  he  cannot 
understand  the  abstract  representation  of  the 
kingdom  of  science  or  of  moral  quality. 


Memorandum  of  lesson  to  Miss 


This  point  to  note :  in  a  composition  in  which 
the  cadence  of  a  number  of  movements  ends 
suddenly  with  a  return  of  line  upon  itself,  the 
sensation  will  be  of  an  accumulation  of  move- 
ment at  the  end  which  will  prevent  this  end 
being  quiet  or  in  repose,  even  if  intended  to 
be  80. 


NOTES  AND  MEMORANDA  259 

In  a  subject  of  pure  composition  in  which  the 
story  is  told  by  the  arrangement  of  lines  and 
figures,  and  by  the  truth  of  their  motions,  the 
background  must  necessarily  be  very  carefully 
studied,  as  the  least  thing  may  throw  the  main 
lines  off  the  equilibrium.  Hence,  naturally,  the 
artificiality  of  backgrounds,  —  hence  often  their 
comparative  unimportance,  —  meaning  by  that 
absence  of  detail,  so  as  to  reach  the  same  end 
as  a  very  successfully  arranged  composition  of 
background,  based  on  realities.  Hence  again  the 
undesirability  of  introducing,  as  in  one  of  the 
subjects  criticised,  an  accidental  naturalistic  dis- 
tance of  trees  and  rocks,  such  as  a  Central  Park 
landscape;  not  only  because  its  accidental  lines 
may  clash,  but  because  in  its  very  essence  of 
having  no  excuse  for  itself,  except  that  it  was 
true,  it  clashes  with  the  whole  idea  of  the  figure 
composition,  which  has  no  pretence  to  having 
really  happened ;  on  the  contrary,  insists  upon 
its  being  a  well-selected  artifice. 

Our  imitative  means  are  so  limited  that  we 
not   only   cannot   weaken  them,  but   are  obliged 


260  APPENDIX 

to  reinforce  them.  Hence,  for  instance,  in  paint- 
ing, the  wisdom  of  reinforcing  the  sentiment  of 
the  picture  by  its  general  impression  of  colour 
or  of  light  and  dark.  Hence  the  musical  accom- 
paniment of  a  song  which  is  in  the  direction  of 
the  meaning  of  the  words. 

This  is  true  in  art  —  in  nature,  it  happens 
rarely.  Whatever  our  own  feelings  may  be, 
whatever  tragedy  we  may  be  suffering  from, 
even  if  it  afflicted  the  entire  human  race  with- 
out exception,  the  sky  above  might  be  more 
smiling  even  than  usual,  and  no  actual  picture 
of  the  scene  would  give  any  idea  of  what  it 
really  meant.  It  is  only  by  art  that  these  con- 
tradictions are  disentangled. 

If  on  the  stage  reality  were  represented,  the 
voice  of  the  actor  in  its  most  agonizing  moments, 
in  the  tenderest  passages,  should  be  interrupted, 
should  be  wiped  out  by  accidental  noises,  them- 
selves just  as  necessary  as  his  —  such  as,  we 
would  say,  the  passing  of  omnibuses,  the  creak- 
ing of  doors,  the  talk  of  indifferent  people. 

Hence   in   your  composition   of   Narcissus,  his 


NOTES   AND   MEMORANDA  261 

being  in  an  open  field,  in  midday,  with  the 
nymphs  coming  up  to  him,  is  so  much  against 
the  mystery  of  his  retiring  within  himself  to 
admire  himself. 

Your  figure,  which  rests,  does  not  rest  long 
enough.  In  the  story  it  is  a  sort  of  contempla- 
tion,—  at  any  rate,  a  looking-down  into  water 
as  a  mirror,  —  and  cannot  be  a  momentary,  quick 
recognition,  such  as  we  get  from  a  looking-glass 
which  makes  a  perfect  reflection,  and  which  we 
are  sure  to  get  again  easily. 

In  the  South  Seas,  the  girls  ponder  very  long 
over  their  reflections  in  the  moving  mirror,  which 
is  all  they  have. 

The  same  objection  might  apply  in  your  com- 
position of  the  judgment  of  Paris,  where  all  the 
figures  stand  in  too  open  a  pasture;  that  is  to 
say,  too  open  as  you  have  represented  it,  because 
it  is  more  natural  than  the  figures,  and  I  am 
obliged  to  accept  it  as  it  is  painted. 

Apart  from  the  story  as  it  is  given  us,  it  seems 
unreasonable,  at  least  in  fairy-land,  that  these 
goddesses   should   expose   themselves  to  be   seen 


262  APPENDIX 

by  any  accidental  passer-by  who  crosses  those 
meadows  that  I  feel  are  behind  the  trees.  And 
if  you  tell  me  that  they  can  appear  and  disappear 
at  will,  then  I  must  feel  that  also  in  their  make, 
—  their  looks. 

In  the  old  story,  Homer,  who  knew  them  very 
well,  seems  to  imply  that  they  took  great  care 
of  their  dresses  and  adornments ;  in  fact,  that 
they  were  very  much  like  ourselves,  only  a  great 
deal  more  so. 

As  to  the  studies  from  nature :  you  are  making 
a  study  out  of  your  window  on  this  very  grey, 
rainy,  monotonous-looking  day,  and  as  I  sit  down, 
taking  your  place  by  the  window,  I  am  not  at 
first  struck  by  the  fact  that  your  grey  sky  is  too 
monotonous,  more  so  than  the  brick  wall  which 
you  are  also  copying.  You  have  transferred  to 
the  brick  wall  the  sense  of  colour  that  it  gives 
you,  and  you  have  given  to  the  sky  the  dreari- 
ness that  one  may  feel  by  being  rained  on ;  but 
now,  as  I  sit  here  a  little  bit  longer,  I  notice 
that  the  real  sky  is  full  of  innumerable  move- 
ments—  movements  of  shade,  of  form,  of  colour, 


NOTES  AND  MEMORANDA  263 

of  light,  of  transparency,  many  more  million 
varieties  than  in  all  the  many-coloured  bricks 
of  that  wall.  I  own  that  one  does  not  notice 
it  at  first,  and  that  it  seems  difficult  to  prove 
when  one  looks  at  that  big,  wet  sheet  of  cloud 
seen  through  the  panes.  But  then  what  makes 
it  so  living,  and  the  wall  so  dead? 

Why,  simply  that  there  is  such  infinite  detail 
flooded  in  light  that  you  cannot  quite   detect  it. 

See,  through  the  rain  we  at  length  notice  two 
clouds  of  the  sky  moving  past.  They  have  been 
there  all  the  time,  but  have  come  nearer  to  us, 
and  at  length  we  see  them.  I  mean  that  we 
now  see  what  their  shape  really  is,  —  but  we 
have  seen  them  all  the  time ;  and  now  that 
we  recognize  them,  we  can  discern  the  existence 
of  many,  many  others  far  back  towards  the  hori- 
zon. These  last  are  hidden  by  the  rain,  or  vapour 
further  back  in  the  distance,  and  behind  them, 
made  indistinct  by  vapour,  spreads  higher  up  a 
great  mass  of  cloud.  In  front  of  everything  is 
a  veil  of  rain  and  vapour.  So  that  this  appar- 
ently dull,  flat   surface   of   sky  is   in   reality  ex- 


264  APPENDIX 

tremely  modelled  and  complicated.  In  fact,  if 
you  will  reflect  a  moment,  there  is  more  model- 
ling in  the  sky  than  there  can  be  in  all  the 
rest  of  the  things  you  are  painting, — that  brick 
wall,  the  old  chimney,  and  the  roof-tops. 

You  see  that  they  all  look  from  wherg  we 
are  perpendicular,  if  I  may  so  say,  compared  to 
the  sky,  which  curves  over  and  which  is  staged 
back,  below,  in  infinite  gradations. 

Now  you  will  see  why  so  many  paintings  of 
the  modern  school  make  the  sky  look  like  a  veil 
hung  behind  the  landscape,  as  if  the  sky  were 
on  the  same  plane  as  the  sides  of  the  buildings 
that  rise  into  it,  and  it  had  no  other  extension. 

If  you  go  up  to  the  Museum,  you  wUl  see  why 
the  skies  of  Corot  look  like  skies;  you  will  see 
why  the  skies  of  the  good  Dutch  painters  curve 
over  and  are  wrapped  around  the  landscape,  so 
that  you  see  the  clouds  hang  over  you. 

The  sky  is  a  place  in  which  the  picture  is.  It 
is  not  something  behind  the  picture.  The  fact 
that  all  these  transitions  and  modellings  are 
very   delicate,   far    from    the    eye,    usually    not 


NOTES  AND  MEMORANDA  265 

modelled  by  light  and  dark,  but  by  transitions 
of  colour,  is  what  makes  them  difficult  to  render. 

You  will  again  recognize  in  the  Corots  these 
variations  of  colour  in  what  are  called  his  greys, 
which  his  imitators  render  by  some  kind  of  mixt- 
ure qf  black  and  white. 

The  sky  that  we  are  now  looking  at  is  not 
only  modelled  by  what  we  call  light  and  shade, 
so  delicate  that  we  find  it  difficult  to  trace,  but 
it  is  modelled  by  varieties  of  colour. 

As  you  will  see,  towards  the  horizon,  I  mean 
our  horizon,  because  the  tops  of  the  houses  are 
over  our  horizon,  it  is  a  little  yellower.  The 
clouds  that  float  in  it,  of  which  we  mainly  see 
the  shadows,  are  more  violet;  the  upper  sky, 
where  the  clouds  are  thinner,  is  greener,  mean- 
ing that  there  is  the  faintest  suggestion  of  blue, 
and,  if  you  will  watch  a  little,  you  will  notice 
that  all  this  mass  of  low  cloud  where  it  is 
thicker  and  makes  shadows  as  it  comes  nearer 
to  the  brick  buildings,  seems  to  harmonize  with 
them  and  you  feel  that  there  is  a  little  pink  or 
rosy  hue,  more  or  less  everywhere. 


266  APPENDIX 

Were  the  sky  to  appear  suddenly,  you  might 
see  these  fog-clouds  —  those  that  are  low  down, 
at  least,  look  reddish.  But  as  you  have  no  con- 
trast to  help  you,  your  eye  is  not  very  sensitive 
to  this.  Only  if  you  do  not  feel  it,  and  give 
some  suggestion  of  it,  you  keep  wondering  why 
your  painted  sky  is  so  cold  and  tea-boardy.  For 
notice  again,  that  properly  there  is  more  colour 
in  this  grey  sky,  dull  as  it  is,  than  in  the  red 
brick  wall  against  it. 

This  is  the  way  you  can  detect  it.  Give  me 
your  palette.  As  you  have  it  arranged,  you  have 
yellows  and  greens  over  to  one  side,  and  on  the 
extreme  other  side  you  have  violets  and  blues. 
In  the  centre  you  have  dull  reds  and  browns. 
Now  as  I  mix  the  paints,  you  will  notice  that 
the  sky  tones  are  made  from  the  fullest  ex- 
tremes,—  the  light  yellows  and  pinks  mixed  with 
the  violets  and  blues.  It  is  true  that  they  are 
blended,  and  make  what  we  call  greys. 

But  the  brick  wall  is  represented  by  a  very 
small  space  of  colour  on  your  palette.  Let  us 
say  a  couple  of  octaves,  the  distance  between  the 


NOTES  AND  MEMORANDA  267 

others  being  enormous.  You  will  see,  therefore, 
that  it  is  merely  a  dulness  of  vision  that  pre- 
vents our  recognizing  this  extraordinary  wealth 
of  colour  in  the  grey.  And  now  I  wish  to  speak 
to  you  about  something  which  I  will  take  up  at 
odd  moments  later. 

Do  not  confuse  paint  and  colour.  Strictly  con- 
sidered, all  these  colours  on  your  palette,  and  any 
combination  you  wish  to  make  of  them,  are  vari- 
eties of  any  one  colour  in  the  key  of  which  you 
wish  to  paint. 

Your  palette  can  be  looked  at  as  a  variety  of 
blues,  or  a  variety  of  reds.  It  is  in  the  tone  that 
you  assume  your  painting  in,  that  you  will  find  the 
harmony  of  all  these  pigments.  Should  you,  for 
instance,  paint  a  large  mass  of  any  one  pigment 
on  your  canvas  without  reference  to  any  reality, 
and  then  insist  that  everything  you  paint  from 
your  palette  shall  be  in  harmony  with  that  mass, 
and  then  you  wipe  it  out,  its  influence  will  have 
coloured  every  stitch  of  paint  or  so-called  colour 
that  you  have  put  in  your  painting.  The  result 
will  be  coloured,  no  matter  how  few  the  pigments 
you  have  used. 


268  APPENDIX 

Theme  —  tipon  studies  from  the  nude. 

Necessity  of  a  greater  synthesis  for  the  division 
of  light  and  shade  so  as  to  make  the  general  con- 
struction appear  more  evident,  as  it  is  with  figures 
at  a  distance. 

Answer  to  a  question  in  lesson  to  Miss . 


So  you  will  teach  me  the  tricks  of  the  trade? 
Yes  and  no.  My  special  point  is  to  make  you 
distinguish  what  is  a  trick  of  the  trade,  and  what 
is  a  principle  of  art,  especially  the  art  of  painting. 
That  is  the  result  that  one  comes  to  from  the 
comparative  study  of  many  works  of  art,  such  as 
is  afforded  by  museums. 

Many  artists  and  almost  all  young  ones  confuse 
the  means  and  the  end.  It  is  perhaps  impossible 
that  that  should  not  be,  as  the  great  point  of  the 
worker  in  art  is  that  execution  should  become 
almost  instinctive  with  him;  nor  can  he  be  easily 
a  thinker. 

I  think  that  I  am  unnecessarily  taxed  by  those 
I  am  teaching  by  having  to  explain  to  them  the 


ANSWER  TO  A  QUESTION  269 

nse,  advantages  or  disadvantages  of  ordinary 
materials,  —  brushes,  canvases,  oils,  mediums,  etc. 
All  these  they  ought  to  work  up  without  me, 
and  I  can  give  them  my  experience,  and  that 
of  others,  about  it.  If  we  consider  it  from  a 
serious  point  of  view,  as  would  be  required  from 
such  a  course  as  this,  it  might  take  at  least 
"several  tens"  of  lectures,  so  that  it  must  prac- 
tically lie  out  of  our  scheme  except  as  helping 
to  explain  occasionally,  and  ease  the  difficulties 
of  a  student.  For  example,  there  have  been 
painters  —  modern  painters  —  to  whom  the  use  of 
bitumen  was  so  important  as  a  help  that  with- 
out understanding  this  fact  and  its  connections, 
we  have  no  adequate  explanation  of  their  paint- 
ings, and  of  how  they  came  to  see  bitumen  in 
nature  because  it  was  convenient.  Just  as  to-day 
a  great  many  people  see  white  lead,  which  does 
not  exist  in  the  atmosphere,  any  more  than  bitu- 
men. Remember  and  remember  again,  and  when- 
ever you  are  in  doubt,  remember  that  pigments 
are  not  colours,  nor  light,  nor  air,  nor  shade,  nor 
distance,  nor  atmosphere. 


270  APPENDIX 

Bemark   to  another  pupil  in  connection  with  this. 

Pupil.  "  I  can't  help  painting  very  white — 
and  the  flowers  look  very  white  to  me.  I  don't 
see  how  they  can  be  whiter.  But  I  think  the 
frame  doesn't  suit.  It  leaves  the  picture  flat  and 
the  flowers  don't  go  back." 

Answer.  "  Let  me  see  the  frame  off  from  the 
picture.  Now  please  notice  that  when  I  put  it 
in  front  of  the  flowers  which  you  are  copying, 
they  seem  to  keep  their  place  just  the  same  and 
do  not  stick  out  of  the  frame.  I  think  it  safer 
to  assume  that  the  picture  is  wrong  and  the 
white  lead  also.  In  fact,  it  is  because  they  are 
white-lead  colour  and  not  white-flower  colour, 
which  is  a  very  different  thing,  that  they  refuse 
to  take  their  place  behind  the  frame." 


A   NEW   AND   ENLARGED   EDITION. 

PEN    DRAWING    AND    PEN 
DRAUGHTSMEN. 

THEIR  IVORK  AND   THEIR  METHODS. 

A  STUDY  OF  THE  ART  TO-DAY  WITH  TECHNICAL  SUGGESTIONS 
By  JOSEPH    PENNELL. 


With  over  400  Illustrations,  including  many  Examples  from  Original  Drawings  by 

Sir  F.  Leighton,  Sir  J.  E.  MiLLAis,  Sir  E  BURNE-JONES,  F.  Sandys, 

F.  Shields,  E.  Pinwell,  VV.  Small,  F,  Walker,  Mahoney 

W.  North,  E.  A.  Abbey,  Holman  Hunt,  A.  Parsons. 


Demy  4to.    Bound  in  Buckram.    $15.00. 


"  One  can  hardly  turn  the  leaves  of  this  sumptuous  volume  without  giving 
vent  to  repeated  exclamations  of  surprised  delight.  It  is  a  treasury  of  faithful 
specimens  of  the  work  and  the  methods  of  the  artistic  wielders  of  the  pen,  and 
a  study  of  the  art  to-day,  with  abounding  technical  suggestions."  —  Boston 
Courier. 

"  It  is  indispensable  to  the  artist  and  almost  indispensable  to  the  man  who 
loves  books."  —  Commercial  Advertiser. 

"  As  representing  pen  illustrative  art  it  stands  unique  and  alone."  —  Boston 
Ti-anscript. 


THE  MACMILLAN   COMPANY, 

ee  FIFTH  AVENUE,  NEW  YORK. 


A^" 


This  book  is  or  >  last  «*-»..  stamped  bdow 


?IRT  LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIPORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angdes 

This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


^^//^ 


UCLA-Art  Library 
ND1150L13C 

1! 

L  006  248  495  1 

vJuSODTHtR',  RE  ClOV-^  LIBRARY  FAC 


A    001  231  360 


UNIVERSITY  of  CALIFORNl 

AT 

LOS  AX>JGELES 

LIBRARY 


